Cat and Head Problems with Binary Files
Jeffry T Ross
jtr@mitre.org
Thu Jul 22 17:49:00 GMT 1999
Who ever said that cat and head are textutils?
On the Unix side of the world they're commonly used
on binary files. If you have a 10gig file of binary
data, what the easiest way to get a 10k chunk?
How about: head -c 10000 bigfile > littlefile
This works in Unix because Unix thinks all files are
binary, and that's because all files are binary. The
notion of text files is a bogus limitation imposed by
Microsoft.
Is there a reason why having cat treat all files as binary
would cause erroneous performance when cat was used on a
file you'd consider to be text?
Thanks,
jtr@mitre.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Earnie Boyd [ mailto:earnie_boyd@yahoo.com ]
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 1999 8:31 PM
To: jtr@mitre.org; cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com
Subject: Re: Cat and Head Problems with Binary Files
--- Jeffry T Ross <jtr@mitre.org> wrote:
> I've seen a lot of discussion about cat's handling of binary files.
> What I didn't see and would like to know is if the next version of
> cygwin will allow me to correctly pipe or redirect the output from
> cat and head if the source is a binary file? Also, why were these
> programs implemented this way to begin with?
>
They are textutils for text files. If you want something different, that is
the reason it's OpenSource.
>
> I'm trying to pipe a binary file to a program I wrote and either
> the pipe/redirect is breaking or cat/head is dying at arbitrary
> points in the binary files. I suspect that my binary files contains
> what looks like an EOF. This is similar to other threads I've seen
> on this list.
>
Definitly. In this case, eiter modify the sources and recompile or use binary
mounts which will default to binary file processing. WARNING: You'll have to
change all \r\n line endings in scripts to \n.
===
Earnie Boyd < mailto:earnie_boyd@yahoo.com >
Newbies, please visit
< http://www.freeyellow.com/members5/gw32/index.html >
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