Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@sourceware.cygnus.com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@sources.redhat.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@sources.redhat.com Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 22:29:00 -0500 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: file descriptors opened as text files Message-ID: <20010214222900.D25745@redhat.com> Reply-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com References: <5.0.2.1.0.20010214171434.00a8f6f0@pop.ma.ultranet.com> <5.0.2.1.0.20010214175309.00a92220@pop.ma.ultranet.com> <3A8B284F.8071591E@ihug.co.nz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.11i In-Reply-To: <3A8B284F.8071591E@ihug.co.nz>; from ross.s@ihug.co.nz on Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 01:52:31PM +1300 On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 01:52:31PM +1300, Ross Smith wrote: >"Larry Hall (RFK Partners Inc)" wrote: >> >> At 05:43 PM 2/14/01, Jean Delvare wrote: >> >> >That may explain why I could not see the flag on linux's man pages. But >> >there is no man page for open(2) on Cygwin, right ? Then, where am I >> >supposed to find the value for this flag, if it ever exist ? I can't just >> >invent it, I guess it won't work ;) >> >> "b" is fine, as you indicated before. Check the MSDN library at >> msdn.microsoft.com for one source. I'm sure you can find this information >> in any POSIX complaint UNIX API reference. > >Possibly not. I don't have a copy of the relevant Posix standard, but >the Single Unix Standard (which I believe is intended to be a superset >of Posix) doesn't recognise the binary/text mode distinction. > >However, the C standard mandates that fopen() uses text mode by default >in the absence of the "b" flag, and the C++ standard says the same thing >about iostreams. So, given that the two higher-level I/O APIs are both >required to default to text mode, it seems perfectly reasonable to me >for the lowest-level one, open(), to do the same thing in the absence of >any standard requirements, and it looks as though the Cygwin designers >have followed the same reasoning. I suspect that the main reason for implementing things this way was that "It works that way with MSVC". I don't know that anyone really knows the real reason for this, though. Maybe it was just a horrible mistake that has been propagated since the projects inception in 1995. cgf -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple