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From: kleonard@gvlv2.GVL.Unisys.COM (Ken Leonard)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Trouble With Arced Simtel20 Files
Message-ID: <443@gvlv2.GVL.Unisys.COM>
Date: 6 Dec 89 14:03:40 GMT
References: <8643.2572b0cb@ecs.umass.edu> <35180011@hpindda.HP.COM>
Organization: Unisys Defense Systems, NISD, Great Valley Laboratory
Lines: 34

In article <35180011@hpindda.HP.COM> hardin@hpindda.HP.COM (John Hardin) writes:
* kleonard@gvlv2.GVL.Unisys.COM (Ken Leonard) writes:
* >In article <8643.2572b0cb@ecs.umass.edu> fritz@ecs.umass.edu writes:
* >* I have recently started downloading some files from the SIMTEL20 system. The
* >* only problem is that when I download them and try to UN-ARC them...they all
* >* seem to have a CRC MISMATCH and the file is automatically marked corrupt. Is
* >* there some sort of special ARC program I should be using? I've tried PAK, and
* >* PKXARC and they both giveK8 the same trouble. 
* >I've been getting files from SIMTEL with great success for nearly two years,
* >until about a week ago. Then I, too, started getting files I couldn't un-arc!
* >I've tried PKUNPAK, PK35, ARCE, and a couple others. NOTHING WORKS!
* >---------HELP!------------
* Don't know if this will help anyone, but I have noticed that SIMTEL archives
* appear to be corrupted when I uudecode them using one of the scripts that
* was posted here a while back for decoding multi-part submissions. The symptom
* is that the decoding appears to work but the failure is on the dearchiving
* step. When I put the parts together by hand (i.e., using vi), stripping off
* all the extraneous stuff, and then run the single piece through uudecode,
* the dearchiving step works fine. I haven't the expertise in script writing,
* nor the time, to debug this. The decoding script works fine for stuff from
* comp.binaries.ibm.pc, however.
Well, since I went back over my tracks again, and tried a couple things again,
What I found is that the "autoftp" shell and programs I got from the net
recently seem to have a problem (I have been using them for _some_ of my
recent downloads).  The shell provides for each file to be specified
as either _binary_ or _ascii_ retrieval, but, seems to be using the
mode specified for the _first_ file for all files!  so that when I ask
for an ascii-mode text file followed by a binary-mode arc file, the arc
file is retrieved in ascii mode!  So the solution is to run separate 
shell jobs for the two modes, which still isn't bad because it's still
a _heck_ of a lot easier than doing the ftps manually.
----------------
regardz,
Ken Leonard