Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?
Message-ID: <865@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 01:46:22 GMT
References: <302@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <225800017@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <8042@elsie.UUCP>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 15

In article <8042@elsie.UUCP>, ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) writes:
[ Citation omitted by Olson]
> > If UNIX needed this facility, and if it used "b" to indicate binary mode,
> > 	FILE *binin = fdopen(fileno(stdin), "rb");
> > 	FILE *binout= fdopen(fileno(stdout),"wb");
> > 	/* use bin_in, bin_out instead of stdin, stdout */
> > would do the job.  Would this work in MSDOS?
> 
> Whether or not it works in MSDOS, it wouldn't work in draft proposed ANSI C
> (which lacks an "fdopen" function).

That's hardly news:  the point of the discussion was precisely that the
ability to do binary I/O on stdin/stdout was something that some people
needed and didn't appear to be available in dpANS.  The point of my message
was to suggest that instead of switching a stdio stream between several modes
it might suffice to be able to attach new streams to existing ports.