From: benny AT crocodial DOT de (Benjamin Riefenstahl) Subject: Re: mount type, compiler barf, and sym links 22 Oct 1998 22:43:52 -0700 Message-ID: <362F1ECF.4B7A26A5.cygnus.gnu-win32@crocodial.de> References: <001201bdfcd6$7282af50$124b47c1 AT sorokin DOT intervett DOT no> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Hi Bjørn, Bjørn Hell Larsen wrote: > For instance, in the GNU-Win32 distribution, the tools "cat" and "grep" > are classified as "text tools", In practice cat is commonly used to handle binary files. Also cat does not process files in any way. It's pointless to convert input from external to internal representation just to output the very same data with the backwards conversion. Cat should use binary mode. [grep using text mode] > MATCHES=`grep -c pattern binaryfile` > > won't do what I expected it to do. In which way? As far as I see this example should work the same as under Unix. Other uses of grep might have different behaviour than on Unix. But in most cases that I can imagine off the top of my head, I don't have any trouble arguing that grep should not really be used in those cases in the first place. > I would much prefer a single global setting that I could toggle, > that would make all tools work in complete binary mode, under > the assumption that I *know* about the MS/Unix file format > differences, and would prefer to be left to deal with them > myself. That is what binary mounts do. At the expense that tools that deal with and process text files (like bash) suddenly break, when they get fed native text, even though the tool is written correctly. IOW binary mounts favour broken tools instead of correct tools. so long, benny ====================================== Benjamin Riefenstahl (benny AT crocodial DOT de) Crocodial Communications EntwicklungsGmbH Ruhrstraße 61, D-22761 Hamburg, Germany - 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".