Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!oravax!norman
From: norman@oravax.UUCP (Norman Ramsey)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Standard for file transmission
Message-ID: <240@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 88 19:26:03 GMT
References: <292@cullsj.UUCP> <7808@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: norman@oravax.odyssey.UUCP (Norman Ramsey)
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca, New York
Lines: 18


Someone mentioned that uuencode/decode do no error checking.  There is
a program called btoa/atob that converts binary to ascii and back
again.  It is more efficient than uuencode/decode (4 bytes binary go
to 5 bytes ascii) and has a checksum built in.  The programs are quite
short and I have ported them to the IBM PC no problem.  At my site at
least they came with compress 4.0, which itself came with TeX, so I
assume they are public domain.

Most frequently I use them with a script called `tarmail' which is
essentially  tar | compress | btoa | split -700 | mail, where we
actually mail things across the net in 700-line chunks.  There is an
`untarmail' at the other end which strips off the headers and (if
there are no errors) does the uncompress, the tar x, et cetera.  I'm
sure a `tarpost' could be put together with little or no difficulty.

Norman Ramsey
norman%oravax.uucp@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu