Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?

M. Warner Losh hydrovax at titan.nmt.edu
Sun Apr 3 11:27:57 AEST 1988


In article <3295 at haddock.ISC.COM> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
+In article <2500 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
+>[In VMS] the default type of a file opened from a C program is stream-LF,
+>which uses records terminated by linefeeds, and does not distinguish between
+>text and binary formats at all, acting like UNIX and POSIX files.
+The fact that it's called "stream-LF" (as distinct from "stream-CR" or just
+"stream") suggests that the newlines which terminate the records have some
+significance to the OS.  Is it legal, for example, to write 70000 characters
+without a newline?  If not, this doesn't seem like an acceptable format for
+binary mode.

In VMS it is legal (VMS 4.4 C 2.2).  There are a few system utilities that will
gronk and die when you try to use this format.  I think that this is a small
problem with i/o quotas not being set up correctly, but never did look into
it more deeply.  I got around the problem by not having to use that particular
system utility :-)

+Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint


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