delorie.com/archives/browse.cgi   search  
Mail Archives: cygwin/1997/01/30/09:14:29

From: franl AT amulet DOT com (Fran Litterio)
Subject: RE: ASCII and BINARY files. Why?
30 Jan 1997 09:14:29 -0800 :
Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com
Distribution: cygnus
Message-ID: <c=US%a=_%p=Amulet._Inc.%l=JAGUAR-970130155732Z-7670.cygnus.gnu-win32@jaguar.amulet.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Original-To: "'Jim Balter'" <jqb AT netcom DOT com>
Original-Cc: "'gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com'" <gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com>
X-Mailer: Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.994.63
Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com

Jim Balter wrote:

>Fran Litterio wrote:
>> I just tried Notepad under NT 4.0 Workstation, and it works fine on text
>> files lacking any CRs.
>
>Did you check the file size to be *sure* that it does not contain CR's?
>On my NT 4.0 system, Notepad shows naked linefeeds as solid blocks
>and does not break the line after them.

Mea culpa.  I was trusting the output of od -x to show me every byte in
the text file (even though I wasn't using mount -b).  od -x didn't show
me any CRs, even though they were there.

>unix deals with byte streams, and there are many tools for
>manipulating them, rather than having systems that think
>they know what they are doing deleting every byte after a ^Z
>and destroying valuable work.

Yes.  I am now completely convinced that gnu-win32 should switch to an
all-binary-all-the-time scheme.  read() should not convert CRNL to NL
(nor write() do the reverse).  cat should not have implicit knowledge of
what a ^Z means (i.e., nothing under UNIX).  The gnu-win32 DLL should
probably even be made recognize a ^D typed on the keyboard (not coming
down a pipe) to mean end-of-file.  I'm not opposed to activating these
non-UNIX behaviors conditionally (i.e., via environment variables, mount
options, filename prefixes, etc.), but the default behavior should be
all-binary-all-the-time.
--
Francis Litterio
franl AT amulet DOT com
http://world.std.com/~franl/

-
For help on using this list, send a message to
"gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".

- Raw text -


  webmaster     delorie software   privacy  
  Copyright © 2019   by DJ Delorie     Updated Jul 2019