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From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Packit + BinhHex; All in one; Is that possible?
Message-ID: <2190@peora.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-May-86 09:35:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: peora.2190
Posted: Wed May 28 09:35:12 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 30-May-86 06:02:15 EDT
References: <1283@princeton.UUCP> <11784@amdcad.UUCP>
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Orlando, Fl
Lines: 23

> What you are missing is the fact that outside of Usenet, the BinHex 4
> encoding mechanism is obsolete, and unused.  All the newer terminal
> emulators including MacTerminal 2.0, Red Ryder, Freeterm have a built in
> encoding scheme called MacBinary.  So encoding is not required in the
> packing program.

Is this format documented anywhere?  I am presently working on an
application where I need to convert a Macintosh file into a plain "flat"
file. (Well, actually I'm not working on it at the moment, while I decide
what is the best way to do the above... otherwise you'd have it already!)
In my application (Lempel-Ziv compression) the contents of the file are
unimportant; it needs to be treated just as the string of bytes that make
it up.

What I really wish is that the Macintosh toolbox included a "linear open"
mode for files, where you could read sequentially from a file open in this
mode and get, in turn, the finder information, the data fork, and the
resource fork; and writing in this mode would create those in turn (so
that writing and reading were inverses).  This would be really helpful
for a variety of applications where you want to take a Macintosh file and
transmit it in a linear fashion.
-- 
E. Roskos