Subject: Re: using cat on binary files (CTRL-Z trauma)
From: [email-masked] (DJ Delorie)

29 Oct 1996 21:46:37 -0800
Sender: [email-masked]
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Original-To: [email-masked]
Original-CC: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
In-reply-to: <[email-masked]> ([email-masked])
Original-Sender: [email-masked]

> Maybe we can file a class action suit for a few billion against the
> turkey who unleashed on the world a system with such fundamentally
> bad design decisions as a two-character EOL indicator and an in-band
> EOF indicator.

It was a good design.  It's an old design.  If you want to toast
someone, toast the idiots that chose to *keep* the design past its
useful life.

If you want to know why CRLF is the standard, try this command on a unix
box:

	stty -onlcr -icrnl

Note that MS-DOS does not have, nor has ever needed, an stty command.
Nor does MS-DOS need the termios libraries.  Nor does it have a
termcap.  Neither DOS nor Unix are better than the other; each has its
good points and bad points.  The DJGPP mailing list sees both sides;
the dos folks switching to a unix compiler have a similar number of
valid greivances about the "Unix way".

DJ
-
For help on using this list, send a message to
"[email-masked]" with one line of text: "help".