Subject: RE: ASCII and BINARY files. Why?
From: [email-masked] (Fran Litterio)

29 Jan 1997 18:49:04 -0800
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Jim Balter wrote:

>Fran Litterio wrote:
>
>> What problem is that?  Windows tools work fine on gnu-win32 text files
>> (i.e., text files without any ^M's) -- at least every Windows tool I
>> have tried.  David Korn's UWIN project has decided to open all files in
>> binary mode all the time precisely because so few (if any) Windows apps
>> care whether a text file contains ^M characters or not.
>
>Well, there's always Notepad

I just tried Notepad under NT 4.0 Workstation, and it works fine on text
files lacking any CRs.  In fact, after editting a NL-terminated text
file with Notepad and saving it, the file still doesn't contain CRNL
sequences!  If I didn't know better, I'd say Microsoft has _deprectated_
the use of CR in text-files.

>and the WinZip internal file viewer

Ditto.  I just tried it and it works fine with a text file lacking CRs.

>and probably plenty of others.

I can't find any NT 4.0 app that reacts badly to a text file that's
missing CRs.

>The current situation is that, even fixing things like gzip,
>the rest of the tools are useless on help files, executables,
>databases, or any other sort of file that isn't a "text" file.

But not if gnu-win32 goes all-binary-all-the-time, correct?

I agree that if a friend gives you a text file containing CRNL newline
sequences, then gnu-win32 tools will preserve those ^Ms.  But that's no
different than if you're on a UNIX workstation and someone mails you
such a text file or it you download it via HTTP.  UNIX folks have been
typing

	tr -d '\015' <dosfile >unixfile

>ever since PCs began connecting to the net.
--
Francis Litterio
[email-masked]
http://world.std.com/~franl/
>
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