1.5.10: bug in /usr/sbin/strfile

[Andy Rushton]

I know that problems with strfile have been reported before, but looking 
through the list archive I haven't seen a clear statement of the problem 
nor any responses that deal with the problem.

The symptoms: If I run strfile on a file of quotes to generate a .dat 
file for the fortune program, I get strange behaviour from fortune for 
that quote file. I either get blank fortunes, or sometimes just the same 
quote again and again. I tried this with the latest stable release of 
Cygwin (1.5.10) but its been around for a long time.

I suspect that this is another example of an old problem with Unix 
programs ported to Windows. I mount my disks in text mode so that for 
text files (but not binary files) \n gets translated to DOS line-ends. 
This option tends to show up bugs in Unix programs where binary files 
are opened incorrectly in text mode. This is a common bug because on 
Unix there is no difference between text and binary modes.

So I tried adding a new mount point:

D:\cygwin\usr\share\fortune on /usr/share/fortune type system (binmode)

This makes just the fortune quote files' directory binary mode - i.e. no 
text file conversions.

Sure enough, strfile now creates .dat files that fortune likes.

Okay, having a special mount point is a bodge. It does however show that 
my suspicions are probably correct. I suspect that somewhere in 
strfile's source is an fopen with the mode "w" instead of "wb" when the 
.dat file is created. However, I don't know who's responsible for this 
program - so I thought I'd post my conclusions here. Is there anyone out 
there who knows how to get this fixed?

Andy

-- 
Andy Rushton, Southampton, UK

If all these sweet young things were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be a
bit surprised.
		-- Dorothy Parker


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