Using cat, head, tail on binary files

[Erik Sobel]

What is the trick to getting cat, head, and tail to work correctly with 
binary files under WinNT?  I tried setting the CYGWIN environment variable 
to "binmode" as recommended by the documentation.  This got things closer 
to working but it's still not right.

Example:  given a binary file named foo of size 10000 bytes
CYGWIN=tty
head -c50 foo > foo.part1              # got 23 bytes from foo
tail -c1000 foo > foo.part2             # got 648 bytes from foo
cat foo.part1 foo.part2 > new_foo  # is not the sum of the two input file sizes

CYGWIN=binmode
head -c50 foo > foo.part1              # got 58 bytes from foo
tail -c1000 foo > foo.part2             # got 1046 bytes from foo
cat foo.part1 foo.part2 > new_foo  # is not the sum of the two input file sizes

cat foo foo > foo2  # is not twice the size of foo

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Erik
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik Sobel
esobel@alphatech.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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