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From: Chris Faylor <cgf AT cygnus DOT com>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:04:24 -0400
To: cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Subject: Re: hybrid text/binary mount
Message-ID: <20000424150424.A1421@cygnus.com>
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References: <200004241831 DOT OAA05979 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com>
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In-Reply-To: <200004241831.OAA05979@envy.delorie.com>; from dj@delorie.com on Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 02:31:19PM -0400

On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 02:31:19PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
>Hey, I've got an idea.  How about a mount mode where files opened for
>reading do CR/LF conversion *if* they look like text files (i.e. no
>binary characters, all CR/LF are part of CR/LF pair), and files open
>for writing always write files in binary mode.

That's amazing.  I have been thinking about the same thing for several
days.  I have started to type this in several time but always hit a wall
when I realized that given the nature of this mailing list, either no one
would respond or somewone will respond with a twenty page treatise on the
way they think it should be done with no hint of an effort to volunteer to
do the actual work.

I was thinking that if a file had any characters whose ASCII code was
< ' ' or >= DEL before the first \n, then the file would be considered
binary.  Otherwise, the file would be text.  You could apply this heuristic
to both input and output.

This might catch a majority of the cases where people really want binary
code but it is so non-deterministic that it might make problems harder
to track down.

I was thinking of a CYGWIN=autobinmode and a mount '-a' option.

cgf