ASCII and BINARY files. Why?

[Fergus Henderson]

Francis Litterio, you wrote:
> 
> Michael Paul Smith <mike@willingham.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > The ASCII or BINARY thing is no big deal in practice.
> 
> Then you've probably never done any of these things under UNIX:
> 
> 1.  Used cat to aggregate a partitioned gzip file:
> 
> 	cat file.gz.1 file.gz.2 file.gz.3 | gunzip -c > file

That one is indeed a serious problem.

> 2.  Used sed to change the names of symbols in an object file:
> 
> 	sed 's;read;rEaD;g' < foo.o > newfoo.o

You shouldn't do this anyway!  It's a hack that might happen to work,
if you're lucky, but you shouldn't complain if it breaks.

> 3.  Or even just tried to see a hex or octal dump of what's
>     in a file that doesn't contain text:
> 
> 	od foo.gz

That one could be fixed without too much difficulty by changing
"od" to open the file in binary mode.

Problem "1" is a much stronger argument for always using binary
mode than problems "2" or "3".

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: < http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh >   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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