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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Misinformation on lseek
Message-ID: <27333@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 6-Sep-87 20:19:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.27333
Posted: Sun Sep  6 20:19:04 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Sep-87 03:48:43 EDT
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> (2) Both systems offer a variety of file formats; the user may select the
> file format type.  Both offer raw blocking, i.e files with a fixed physical
> record size with no internal formatting.  [Effectively this is the only
> thing that UNIX supplies.]

More correctly, this is the only thing the UNIX *kernel* supplies (if you don't
count e.g.  the terminal driver, which returns lines terminated by NL when in
cooked mode).  The UNIX standard I/O library routine supplies variable-length
lines terminated with NL, and fixed-length records ("fread", "fwrite").  The
record format is not stored in the file system in any fashion.

The VMS *kernel*, to the best of my knowledge, only supplies raw blocking (QIOs
to read and write blocks); the various record formats are provided by RMS.  The
file system permits packages such as RMS to store file attributes in the file's
header.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com