Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!im4u!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-gr!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wes
From: wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?
Message-ID: <122@obie.UUCP>
Date: 4 Apr 88 17:26:18 GMT
References: <302@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <225800017@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <3295@haddock.ISC.COM>
Organization: the Well of Souls
Lines: 19
Summary: VMS stream files

In article <3295@haddock.ISC.COM>, karl@haddock.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.

VMS "stream" files have a block size of 1 char, so you can write out
whatever you want (as long as you don't overflow the device).
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