cat and binary files

[Tim Iverson]

If cat is stopping at Ctl-Z on anything but console input, it is a bug.
There has been no actual "end-of-file" marker in DOS since version 2.0.
The Ctl-Z is only EOF for the *console*, just like Ctl-D is EOF for
/dev/tty under Unix.  And, like /dev/tty, it's only EOF when the console is
in cooked mode.  If you put the console into raw mode, Ctl-Z does nothing.

Some DOS programs have yet to alter their behavior and still place Ctl-Z at
the end of disk files.  This is also a bug, though if you want to support
DOS 1.0, you could call it a feature.

All this aside, IMHO, cat is inherently a binary program -- it shouldn't
care whether newline is CR, LF, or CR+LF unless one of the line-based
options is used (bns).

BTW, I wouldn't recommend using binary mode.  I tried that briefly and
found that rebuilding will fail rather miserably.


- Tim Iverson
  iverson@cisco.com


+----------------
| To: marc@watson.ibm.com
| cc: Win32 Mailing List <gnu-win32@cygnus.com>
| Subject: Re: cat and binary files 
| Date: Wed, 09 Apr 1997 17:22:26 -0400
| From: Ed Huott <huott@pinebush.com>
| 
| In message < 9704091349.AA39368@marc.watson.ibm.com >, Marc Auslander writes:
| >cat seems to stop before the end of input - I assume at an end of file
| >character.  cat --help doesn't offer a binary flag.  How can I cat
| 
| Use the 'mount' command with the '-b' option to make sure that the
...
| can be set to 1 to turn on the behavior where all files are treated as
| binary (recommended).
-
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