Re: (OT) Fixing Line Endings

[swampyankee]

I'm surprised that you've got this problem when FTPing programs; my experience has been that ftp usually starts up in ASCII mode (and I usually forget to put it into binary mode, resulting in me downloading a corrupted binary, smacking my head against the monitor, turning binary mode on, and repeating the download). I have seen it when Windows and *ix boxen are networked together; apparently some networking systems are bright enough to manage big-endian - little-endian conversions but not quite intelligent enough to do end-of-line correction.

Ovid's solution is clever. Hacking ftpd may be a "superior" solution, but Ovid would be doing this on somebody else's nickel, and those somebodies may not want to pay for it.

[throop]

> ftp usually starts up in ASCII mode

Perhaps the files were in a .tar or .zip?

Would there be a similar problem when moving Perl files en masse from *nix to Windows?

[swampyankee]

>> ftp usually starts up in ASCII mode

As I said, my experience has been that ftp usually starts up in ASCII mode. I believe that some ftp daemons can be configured to default to binary mode. Since most of the traffic is likely to be binary, doing so would make a good deal of sense.

>> Perhaps the files were in a .tar or a .zip?

From the way Ovid's original post was worded, it didn't seem so.

>> Would there be a similar problem when moving Perl files en masse from *nix to Windows?

Well, I know that text files can lose their end-of-record markers, turning a multi-line text file into a very long single line. I don't know whether Perl's parser will recognize \n vs \r\n as an end of line marker. It may, which could result in a perfectly valid Perl program that looks like a very long one-liner.