Problems opening pipes in binary mode

Dr Rainer Woitok rainer.woitok@gmail.com
Sun Mar 5 16:03:00 GMT 2017


Greetings,

after some discussion the packages "awk", "grep", and "sed" were recent-
ly updated to open pipes  in binary mode only.   I do not want to revive
the discussion about pros and cons,  I just want to make known  how this
change broke one of my scripts.  My script contains the line

   cygcheck -cv | gawk '...'

which now produces  utterly garbled output.   The reason  simply is that
"cygcheck" produces output lines with Windows style line ends.   To test
just run the following:

   $ cygcheck -cv | od -tcx1 | head -4
   0000000   C   y   g   w   i   n       P   a   c   k   a   g   e       I
            43  79  67  77  69  6e  20  50  61  63  6b  61  67  65  20  49
   0000020   n   f   o   r   m   a   t   i   o   n  \r  \n   L   a   s   t
            6e  66  6f  72  6d  61  74  69  6f  6e  0d  0a  4c  61  73  74

So there obviously is at least one Cygwin tool  which uses Windows style
"\r\n" line ends  in its output.   I don't know whether or not there are
any others,  but in my opinion this move to binary mode pipes should not
have been made as long as there are Cygwin tools producing Windows style
line ends.

Sincerely,
  Rainer

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