Re: [PLUG] split & cat

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 08:27:21PM -0500, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 06:33:13PM -0500, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> > That might be an issue in general, but it this case it will work just
> > fine.  copy /b foo+bar baz will reconstruct the file without changing
> > anything in foo or bar.
> 
> It will only work right if split(1) and DOS's copy think line
> endings are the same character. It *will* fail if they disagree.

Why do you think DOS's copy command cares about end of line
characters?

> Are you suggesting that DOS's copy magically figures out what kind
> of line-ending existed previously? What about what split(1) does
> when there are two EOLs in a row?

Not at all.  The original poster said he had a binary file, and DOS's
copy command has a /b option to treat the input file as-is.  Actually
copy will handle the linefeeds just fine (that is, it would keep them
as linefeeds and not add the carriage returns).  The reason for the /b
option is eof characters.  DOS used to treat C-z (ascii 26) as an end
of file marker, and the /b told it to keep reading past the first C-z
it found.

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