Mail Archives: cygwin/1999/07/22/21:06:33
Jeffry T Ross wrote:
>
> Who ever said that cat and head are textutils?
> On the Unix side of the world they're commonly used
> on binary files. If you have a 10gig file of binary
> data, what the easiest way to get a 10k chunk?
>
> How about: head -c 10000 bigfile > littlefile
>
> This works in Unix because Unix thinks all files are
> binary, and that's because all files are binary. The
> notion of text files is a bogus limitation imposed by
> Microsoft.
>
> Is there a reason why having cat treat all files as binary
> would cause erroneous performance when cat was used on a
> file you'd consider to be text?
I have a slightly different opinion:
I could just as easily say that cat and text are text utils since
they operate on text files (even extended 8-bit character text files
which one could call binary). There is such a thing as 8-bit text.
The point is, on UNIX files are strings of bytes, not binary and not text,
just a bunch of 8-bit characters strung together in a file. UNIX doesn't
care if those bytes are 'Text" or 'Binary' after all, they are/could be both.
A byte is a byte, of course of course, unless of course the byte is
really two little-endian nybbles. :)
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