Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdahl!dlb!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?
Message-ID: <414@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 28 Mar 88 22:02:52 GMT
References: <4250@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 17

in article <4250@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) says:
> 
> I was just reading over the standard trying to figure out the differences
> between binary and text files and had a few realizations:
> 
>     *	Stdin, stdout, and stderr are assumed to be *text* files.
> A program that does binary I/O on them is not portable.  So, how does
> one fix this?
> 

> ...

On a Unix system, one writes a buffering package for raw bytes,
something akin to stdio, using write().  Since you don't need 
printf and scanf, it's no big deal.  Unfortunately, I have seen 
one implementation of C (IBM System 370) which 
does not have write().  Or if they do, they don't document it.