Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!lts!amanda
From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: FTP "STRU VMS" extension
Message-ID: <882@lts.UUCP>
Date: 7 Feb 89 17:30:55 GMT
References: <602233186.0.KASHTAN@IU.AI.SRI.COM> <8902061636.AA13703@pinocchio.UUCP>
Reply-To: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Reston, VA
Lines: 41

bzs@pinocchio.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:

    What I don't understand is why this isn't taken care of extra-FTP by
    some sort of archiving utility like tar.

    [...]

    It wouldn't really occur to me to ask for an extension to FTP to
    transfer an arbitrary file tree between Unix's (for example), I'd just
    bundle it up with tar and send *that* (possibly compressing and/or
    uuencoding if need be.) In fact, that's SOP.

    [...]

    Isn't this the scheme that Unix tar, Macintosh PACKIT, MS/DOS ARC etc
    have been using for years?
    
    	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||

I agree with Barry's philospophy.  What our FTP does is to bundle up
Macintosh files into MacBinary format and send them in Image mode.  If the
other machine is anything but another Macintosh, they just get stored as-is.
If the other side is a Macintosh, it says, "gee, this is a MacBinary file;
I'll unpack it."  This lets you FTP applications and so on between two
Macs without any hassle.  The only problem is that MacBinary is a brain-
damaged format (no magic numbers), so we add SITE commands to turn the
automatic unpacking on and off.  This prevents tar files from being
falsely recognized as MacBinary and resulting in several-megabyte
invisible files full of garbage :-).  Using Apple's AppleSingle &
AppleDouble formats will solve this problem in future releases.

Nopw, I must admit that this approach works best on systems where
files are basically "Streams o' Bytes" like UNIX, but I can't imagine
it would be too hard to use a variant of ANSI tape format D or something
under VMS/TOPS-20/whatever.

-- 
Amanda Walker			...!uunet!lts!amanda / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net
			  InterCon, 11732 Bowman Green Drive, Reston, VA 22090
--
I humans were meant to fly, the airlines wouldn't keep losing our luggage...