Subject: Re: cat and binary files
From: [email-masked] ("Larry Hall (RFK Partners Inc 617-239-1053)")

10 Apr 1997 21:28:55 -0700
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At 07:38 PM 4/9/97 -0700, Tim Iverson wrote:
<snip>
>All this aside, IMHO, cat is inherently a binary program -- it shouldn't
>care whether newline is CR, LF, or CR+LF unless one of the line-based
>options is used (bns).
>
>BTW, I wouldn't recommend using binary mode.  I tried that briefly and
>found that rebuilding will fail rather miserably.

I would submit that you can extend your binary program argument further
to encompass all the GNU tools.  Certainly they were initially designed for
platforms that had no "text mode" for files and their code makes no
attempt to deal with issues arising from the use of "text" files.  I 
don't want to open up an argument on how these tools should work in a 
DOS based environment but I would like to point out that using them on 
"text" files is basically an unsupported configuration.  While it would be
possible to go through all the utilities and alter the code to force 
the opening of files as binary, this is a lot of work and essentially 
only gets you the same functionality you get when you mount -b.  I think
most if not all would agree than mounting as binary is allot quicker than 
modifying any amount of code.  I personally have been using binary
mounts for some time now without any major difficulty.  The only 
problems I do run into have to do with trying to handle "text" files
created or edited by some DOS based program.  Typically this situation
shows up when a script file containing CRs is run or some startup/rc file
with CRs is used.  These problems are easily remedied by passing the
offending file through some filter.  Other than this "inter-operability"
with DOS/Windows-based programs issue, I've seen no deleterious effects 
of using binary mounts, even for building.  For me, its been a big help!

Just my 2 cents.

Larry Hall                      [email-masked]
RFK Partners, Inc.              (617) 239-1053
8 Grove Street                  (617) 239-1655 - FAX
Wellesley, MA, 02181

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