Jeff Kell ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
: The first real surprise was in the shell, reading the files with the
: "cat" utility.  The non-bytestream files have no newline character!
 
There are a few (documented) corner cases in the emulators.  A file with
a single record is assumed to _not_ have a newline because there is no
data available to know whether it does or not.  This is a weakness of the
method for tracking the EOF of the file since we can't go around adding
data to all the existing files!
 
: Now the real kicker... I logged onto a Unix box and FTP'ed the files
: in ASCII mode.  The results:
 
: unixbox.utc.edu% cat test1 test2 test3
: This is a test file
: This is a test file
: T
: h
: i
: s
[...]
 
: TEST3 was a major surprise.  Is this a bug?  If it isn't, it should
: be in my opinion.  FTP isn't very Posix-friendly as it is, but this
: is pretty bad.  Granted if you transfer in BINARY mode it will work
: for this case (TEST3) but you shouldn't have to do that, it makes no
: sense.
 
Unfortunately, it looks like ascii mode is interpreting the file without
the help of the emulator.  It appears to be going by the 1B recordsize
and splitting the file accordingly.  If it had used the bytestream to
variable emulator, it would have gotten the correct result.
 
: At any rate, I can't do a helpful WWW reference page until I can
: figure this stuff out myself :-(
 
Do those answers help any?
 
: [\] Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
 
Steve