From: riche AT crl DOT com ("Alex Stewart") Subject: Re: ASCII and BINARY files. Why? 9 Feb 1997 15:05:34 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199702092152.AA12495.cygnus.gnu-win32@mail.crl.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Comments: Authenticated sender is Original-To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com, dahms AT ifk20 DOT mach DOT uni-karlsruhe DOT de X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v2.23) Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com > : The issue of modes on pipes would be much less of a problem if the : > mechanism for converting between DOS/Win text and C native : text were a > 1:1 mapping (i.e. NL->CRLF, CRLF->NL, CR->CR(always), : (and LF->NL, but > that's a side-issue)). This way, if I want to pipe : "gzip -dc file | > tar xvf -" (as I often do), it wouldn't matter what mode : the pipe was > created in as long as it was the same mode on both ends, : because any > changes introduced in a C->text conversion would be exactly : reversed in > the text->C conversion on the other end of the pipe. > > Sounds good. > But how do you define LF vs. NL? I consider them to be the same. Easy. LF is when it's in a file, NL is when it's in a C string. All I meant by LF->NL was that if there was a LF character (without a preceeding CR) in a file, it would be "converted" (passed through) to a NL (LF) when read in text mode. (which actually doesn't have a lot to do with the issue 1:1 conversion issue as the writing scheme would never produce a raw LF on its own anyway, so it would just make reading non-text files in text mode a little cleaner.) > I often use "tar cvvf - . | gzip > file". Which, of course, would still experience problems from the ">" redirection, tho such problems would be avoided entirely if my other suggestion were implemented and tar and gzip were compiled with a "binary" flag which caused them both to set their stdin and stdout to binary mode when they started up (as part of crt0 processing or some such). -Alex ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alex Stewart - riche AT crl DOT com - Richelieu @ Diversity University MOO http://www.crl.com/~riche/ "Difficult answers lead to intelligent questions." - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".