Re: Why binary mode?

["Lev Bishop" <lev dot bishop at gmail dot com>]

On 2/22/07, Sven Severus wrote:
> But in a textmode mounted directory, 'echo peng >p.txt' creates
> a 6 byte long file containing 'p' 'e' 'n' 'g' '\r' '\n'.
> OK, exactly as expected. Now I thought, 'cat p.txt' would open
> this file for reading in textmode, according to the default rule.
>
> This is, what I expect, after reading the Cygwin FAQ:
> "When processing in text mode, [...] written to the file [...]
> you in fact get "Hello\r\n". Upon reading this combination,
> the \r is removed [...]".
> Why is it in fact not removed when reading with cat?

Because cat is required by posix to read in binmode. Try, for example:
$ echo peng >p.txt && read CO <p.txt && od -c <<<"$CO"
0000000   p   e   n   g  \n
0000005

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