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From: valley@uchicago (Doug Dougherty)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: minor problem with COPY command
Message-ID: <valley.661107643@gsbsun>
Date: 13 Dec 90 17:00:43 GMT
References: <31600012@hpcvra.cv.hp.com.CV.HP.COM>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 26

everett@hpcvra.cv.hp.com.CV.HP.COM (Everett Kaser) writes:

>OK, here's one for ya (and Microsoft).  Lets assume that you have a program
>called JUNK.COM in your current directory and it's 15385 bytes long (the
>number doesn't matter).  Now, do this:
>     COPY JUNK.* TEMPFILE
>You shouldn't have any other files in the current directory that match JUNK.*
>besides JUNK.COM.  The result of this copy will be a file called TEMPFILE
>with today's date and smaller than the original JUNK.COM (usually by a long
>ways).  What appears to be happening is that the COPY is being done as if
>JUNK.COM was an ASCII file, and as soon as an EOF character (26) is encountered
>the copy halts.  The following will work:
>    COPY JUNK.* A:
>    COPY JUNK.* TEMPFILE.*
>    COPY JUNK.COM TEMPFILE
>But NOT 
>    COPY JUNK.* TEMPFILE
>Seems like a bug to me.

>Everett Kaser                   Hewlett-Packard Company
>...hplabs!hp-pcd!everett        work: (503) 750-3569   Corvallis, Oregon
>everett%hpcvra@hplabs.hp.com    home: (503) 928-5259   Albany, Oregon

The whole "ASCII file/^Z = EOF" thing is a bug, in my view.
All copying should be in binary mode.  Editors should not append ^Zs
to files.  Foo on the Norton Editor!