Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!beta!unm-la!unmvax!titan!hydrovax
From: hydrovax@titan.nmt.edu (M. Warner Losh)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?
Message-ID: <114@titan.nmt.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 88 01:27:57 GMT
References: <302@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <225800017@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <7565@brl-smoke.ARPA> <8036@elsie.UUCP> <3221@haddock.ISC.COM> <2500@bsu-cs.UUCP> <3295@haddock.ISC.COM>
Reply-To: hydrovax@titan.UUCP (M. Warner Losh)
Organization: NMT Hydrology program
Lines: 25

In article <3295@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
+In article <2500@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
+>[In VMS] the default type of a file opened from a C program is stream-LF,
+>which uses records terminated by linefeeds, and does not distinguish between
+>text and binary formats at all, acting like UNIX and POSIX files.
+The fact that it's called "stream-LF" (as distinct from "stream-CR" or just
+"stream") suggests that the newlines which terminate the records have some
+significance to the OS.  Is it legal, for example, to write 70000 characters
+without a newline?  If not, this doesn't seem like an acceptable format for
+binary mode.

In VMS it is legal (VMS 4.4 C 2.2).  There are a few system utilities that will
gronk and die when you try to use this format.  I think that this is a small
problem with i/o quotas not being set up correctly, but never did look into
it more deeply.  I got around the problem by not having to use that particular
system utility :-)

+Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint


-- 
bitnet:	losh@nmt.csnet			M. Warner Losh
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