Date: Tue, 30 Nov 93 11:13:34 +0100
From: hmuelner AT fiicmds03 DOT tu-graz DOT ac DOT at
To: dj AT ctron DOT com
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: O_BINARY

>>>>> "DJ" == DJ Delorie <dj AT ctron DOT com> writes:

>> I would like to suggest a method similar to that used by Borland:
>> To have a global variable _fmode with the two values O_BINARY
>> (perhaps default) and O_TEXT which controls CR/LF translation.

DJ> Such a variable already exists, and functions as you describe.
DJ> The default, as in Borland C, is O_TEXT.

Oh, I did not find that in the documentation ;-)
Where can I change the default to O_BINARY? Does it also work for
stdin/stdout?

>> And there should be an environment (or go32) variable to initialize
>> it.

DJ> No.  This would globally affect all programs.

But only if you set it.

>> Another great help for porting unix programs would be a possibility
>> to detect (e.g. warning to stderr or similar) opens with filenames
>> longer than 8+3 characters.

DJ> This would cause output on most programs.  Even DOS does not
DJ> detect or warn about this.

I recently ported the pbm utilities and the GNU text utilities to
DJGPP.  I was frustrated by all the unnecessary editing. Most of my
text files and all my pbm files do not contain CRs (SET FMODE=BINARY),
but sometimes I need CR-LF translation (e.g. head, if stdout is the
console, but not if it is a file). With an environment variable (or
perhaos two for input and output?) I could change the behavior without
recompiling.

Several months ago I got a compiled version of GNU sort that did not
work for big files, because it generated tempfiles with
"temp%5d%5d" using pid and a serial number. A debugging facility to
inform about filename length overflow would have shown the error
immediately.

Cheers,
Helmut Muelner (GNU and DJGPP fan, MSDOS hater)