Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!eos!labrea!agate!ucbvax!SIMTEL20.ARPA!W8SDZ From: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc Subject: Thanks, I'd rather ... Part 2 Message-ID: Date: 13 Apr 88 05:23:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 61 clark@ttidca.TTI.COM (Ralph Clark) writes: > Now, in addition to the self-extracting ARCs, we are blessed with a > posting containing self-returning carriages, closely followed by a > much appreciated tool to delete the generously embedded carriage returns. Maybe I should have restated something I thought everyone knew: rz/sz runs on more than just Unix hosts. We have it running here on TOPS20. It's becoming somewhat universal, so much so that I keep the latest sources in PD1: instead of PD2: on SIMTEL20. I'm sure that if I had posted the sources with Unix newlines I would have received a large number of complaints from non-Unix users. Someone once said you can't please all of the people all the time. > Who is supposed to be the audience of this group? Postings of DOS text > files, and self-extracting archives, seem to be useful only to those > who read this newsgroup while running DOS. I would have thought that the > vast majority of readers of this group are reading it under UNIX, and > would prefer to receive postings in a form that can be examined, maybe > by arc -t or arc -v, and then downloaded to a DOS machine using a comm > program that does NL -> CR/LF translation where appropriate. DOS text > files within ARCs seem to be handled correctly on UNIX by the UNIX arc -p. The audience of this newsgroup is MSDOS users, many of whom do *not* have a working version of ARC on their Unix hosts. Many are not even on Unix hosts. Some use MSDOS machines running UUPC. This newsgroup also goes to BITNET, I'm told. > Personally, I'd rather see vanilla postings, with no favors done. I have > enough standard, generally available UNIX and DOS tools to get the stuff > from a VAX to my PC Jr. If you are still using ascii downloads from your host you are wasting a lot of time. Far better to download the ARCs than the individual member files. DSZ and rz/sz outperform Kermit by a wide margin. Are you saying you don't want any new Unix tools to deal with the MSDOS files posted here? I am testing a new version of SHAR which allows automatic recombining of multiple part postings. DSZ0329.ARC was the first such posting. If the parts were saved with names such as dsz.shar1, dsz.shar2, and dsz.shar3 they can be unshared with one command using the following shell script with the command unshar dsz.* #!/bin/sh # # unshar shell - unpack one or more shar files # # Copyright 1988 bill davidsen # this program may be used by any person for any purpose. for Name in $* do sed -n '/^[:#]/,$p' $Name | sh done These tools are for the readers of this newsgroup. The new SHAR will be posted when the author, Bill Davidsen, feels it has been fully tested. --Keith Petersen Maintainer of the MSDOS archives at SIMTEL20.ARPA Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA Uucp: {decwrl,harvard,lll-crg,ucbvax,uunet,uw-beaver}!simtel20.arpa!w8sdz