From: lhall AT rfk DOT com (Larry Hall) Subject: Re: cat and binary files 11 Apr 1997 17:24:15 -0700 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <2.2.32.19970411130158.0094c550.cygnus.gnu-win32@ma.ultranet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-Sender: lhall AT ma DOT ultranet DOT com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (32) Original-To: Tim Iverson Original-Cc: iverson AT cisco DOT com, huott AT pinebush DOT com, marc AT watson DOT ibm DOT com, gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com At 09:04 PM 4/10/97 -0700, Tim Iverson wrote: I'd like to inject two points here before this thread dies. >While I would agree that it would be nice to say that all the GNU tools >are inherently binary, that's not really true. Many of the tools are >line oriented, and thus require support for detecting a newline; eg. >sed, awk, diff, grep, gcc, gas, etc.. My understanding is that this is an issue within the toolset since Cygnus forces pipe input and output to be opened in non-binary mode. (Here I refer you to Chuck Bogorad's message in this same thread.) However, I suppose there are some occasions when a DOS/Windows program may write some output to stdout in text mode that someone may want to pipe through to the tools you mention above. I expect altering Cygnus's scheme for pipes would not remedy this situation.... >The other thing I don't understand is this list's seeming indifference >to interoperating with Windows. If you don't want to play with Windows >files, why aren't you off running Unix? That's what I do. Complete interoperability with non-binary files generated by Windows programs is not possible at the moment without some work. This work takes 1 of two forms: 1. If you have a file that you created with a Windows/DOS based program and the file was not created as binary, you need to strip the CRs from the file to insure that it will work with the tools well (of course I'm assuming your mounts are also binary). 2. Go through all the utilities and alter them so they ignore all the extra junk that comes along with using non-binary files. (2) is doable and should allow someone to use the GNU versions of these tools with no thought as to how the file was created but it is still allot of work. It has yet to be done. (1) is also doable, gets you most of the functionality that (2) does (with the possible exception of interoperable pipe issues) and is available today. I'm sure that perceptions of which of these 2 general options is a necessity for these tools is highly subjective but personally I've had very few times when I've needed to use a non-binary Windows files with these tools where binary mounts and a filter to remove the CRs has not sufficed.... Larry - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".