From:	"Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt DOT com>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of GNU Sed 3.02.80 uploaded
Date:	3 Aug 2001 16:18:41 -0500
Organization:	The University of Texas at Austin
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In article <200107241624 DOT MAA22074 AT delorie DOT com>,
Juan Manuel Guerrero <djgpp AT delorie DOT com> wrote:

> This is a port of GNU Sed 3.02.80 to MSDOS/DJGPP.
> This port is based on the alpha release of GNU Sed available as:
>   <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-3.02.80.tar.gz>
>
> DJGPP specific changes.
> =======================
> - Eli Zaretskii contributed a patch to open the input stream in
>   binary mode on platforms, like DOS/WIN95, that distinguish between
>   text and binary files.  This will allow to process files that
>   contain embedded ^Z and lone ^M characters.  This patch has already
>   been submitted by him to the sed maintainer, so this feature may
>   become a standard feature in the next official sed release.  Thanks
>   to Eli Zaretskii for contributing this.

That's completely the wrong way around; DOS doesn't make any
distinction whatsoever between binary and text files at the
file-system level.  What happened was that way back when, Unix adopted
a somewhat non-standard and idiosyncratic definition of "text"
(i.e. delimited by LF only), while MS-DOS fully followed the relevant
standards and adopted a standard definition of text (delimited by
CR-LF).  (If you don't believe me, look at all the RFC's governing
Internet protocols -- if they're text-based, such as SMTP, then they
specify CR-LF line endings.)  So this means that when a C compiler is
moved over to MS-DOS, it has to have two clunky file-handling modes,
one of which translates from standard MS-DOS text format to the
compiler's internal non-standard C/Unix text format -- but this is
completely internal to the "C" environment (not a feature of DOS
itself; look at the documentation for DOS file open/read function
calls such as INT 21H AH=3DH, AH=3FH etc. and you won't see any binary
vs. text differentiation), and so is caused by peculiarities of
Unix/C, not peculiarities of DOS.

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt DOT com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/

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