Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!think!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!dcw
From: dcw@athena.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: binscii file format
Message-ID: <9455@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 25 Feb 89 19:14:49 GMT
References: <464@duteca2.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dcw@athena.mit.edu (David C. Whitney)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 41

In article <464@duteca2.UUCP> marcel@duteca.UUCP (Marcel J.E. Mol) writes:
>
>Is there someone who can describe the format and/or layout of
>binscii files.
>I have no trouble sending binary files from my unix system to my apple,
>and Therefore want to write a program to rebuild the binary file on unix.
>(I someone has such a program in C, please mail it to me or post it to the net.)

I don't recommend doing this as file information (such as type, size, create
date, etc) will be forever lost. In some cases it won't matter, but most of the
time it would be a bad thing.

At any rate, here's what a BinSCII file looks like:

A text file which BinSCII will decode has one or more segments in it.

A segment is identified by it's start marker: FiLeStArTfIlEsTaRt <NL>
immediately following is the translation alphabet (for those cases when
some mailer accidentally changes all open parens to single quotes..) <NL>
Then on one line:
	filename preceded by the filename length - eg SAMPLE is written
		FSAMPLE followed by blanks to fill out 15 chars
	then CRC checked:
		File size (eof marker)
		Start byte in output file of this segment
		File info (date, #blocks, type, etc)
		# of bytes in this segment (size<=12K)
		CRC <NL>

Then one or more lines follow which are then encoding of the file. Each
line is 64 chars long followed by <NL>
the last line is the CRC check of the file.

Bytes are coded 3 at a time into 4 characters (6-bit encoding).

Any questions?

Dave Whitney	A junior in Computer Science at MIT
dcw@athena.mit.edu  ...!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!dcw  dcw@goldilocks.mit.edu
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