Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!MTSG.UBC.CA!USERSIG
From: USERSIG@MTSG.UBC.CA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: .bsq revisited. . .
Message-ID: <2523580@mtsg.ubc.ca>
Date: 30 Oct 90 16:11:20 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

>>Another problem, and it may be specific to the particular VAX system
>>that I'm using, but you cannot FTP a file that is ASCII via Binary or vice
>>versa.  You would think that an ASCII could be sent Binary, but who knows.
> 
>The reason to use ascii transfer is when the two computers at each end use
>different line-seperator characters -- unix uses linefeeds, and Apple has
>always used carriage returns. Using ascii transfer translates these properly.
>If the two systems use the same line seperator then you should be able to use
>binary for text files without problems.
 
An even more important reason for transferring text files in text mode rather
than binary mode is that some systems (namely IBM mainframes) use EBCDIC
encoding for text files rather than ASCII.  An EBCDIC file transferred as
text will be converted to ASCII if the receiving machine uses ASCII.  If
transferred in binary, the file will not change, so it will be useless on an
ASCII system.
 
Les_Ferch@mtsg.ubc.ca