Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: uuencode & xxencode Summary: better versions exist Message-ID: <1990Jul7.122756.1017@cs.dal.ca> Date: 7 Jul 90 12:27:56 GMT References: <203@shiloh.UUCP> Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert) Reply-To: bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography Lines: 18 lamont@shiloh.UUCP (Lamont granquist) writes: > Has anyone out there ever considered patching uuencode & xxencode so that > before the BEGIN line it sticks a line containing info like file size, etc? Although I haven't seen this, there exist variants which offer better error checking. The Dumas encode (UUE and UUD) precedes the encoding with a translation table, so that if certain characters get changed on their way through some node, the file still decodes correctly (the most common problem is changing blanks and reverse quotes). The Dumas package also appends a check character to each line. These changes are ignored by uudecode, so full compatibility is maintained. -- William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2. Tel. (902)426-1577 UUCP=..!{uunet|watmath}!dalcs!biomel!bill BITNET=bill%biomel%dalcs@dalac InterNet=bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca