From: franl@amulet.com (Fran Litterio) Subject: RE: ASCII and BINARY files. Why? 29 Jan 1997 18:49:04 -0800 Approved: cygnus.gnu-win32@cygnus.com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-To: "'gnu-win32@cygnus.com'" X-Mailer: Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.994.63 Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32@cygnus.com Jim Balter wrote: >Fran Litterio wrote: > >> What problem is that? Windows tools work fine on gnu-win32 text files >> (i.e., text files without any ^M's) -- at least every Windows tool I >> have tried. David Korn's UWIN project has decided to open all files in >> binary mode all the time precisely because so few (if any) Windows apps >> care whether a text file contains ^M characters or not. > >Well, there's always Notepad I just tried Notepad under NT 4.0 Workstation, and it works fine on text files lacking any CRs. In fact, after editting a NL-terminated text file with Notepad and saving it, the file still doesn't contain CRNL sequences! If I didn't know better, I'd say Microsoft has _deprectated_ the use of CR in text-files. >and the WinZip internal file viewer Ditto. I just tried it and it works fine with a text file lacking CRs. >and probably plenty of others. I can't find any NT 4.0 app that reacts badly to a text file that's missing CRs. >The current situation is that, even fixing things like gzip, >the rest of the tools are useless on help files, executables, >databases, or any other sort of file that isn't a "text" file. But not if gnu-win32 goes all-binary-all-the-time, correct? I agree that if a friend gives you a text file containing CRNL newline sequences, then gnu-win32 tools will preserve those ^Ms. But that's no different than if you're on a UNIX workstation and someone mails you such a text file or it you download it via HTTP. UNIX folks have been typing tr -d '\015' unixfile >ever since PCs began connecting to the net. -- Francis Litterio franl@amulet.com http://world.std.com/~franl/ > - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request@cygnus.com" with one line of text: "help".