From: Phrogz <phrogz@...>
Date: 2007-10-05T00:35:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Binary data, command output, and Ruby

On Oct 4, 8:03 am, Phrogz <phr...@mac.com> wrote:
> > > good = File.open( 'gkhead.jpg', 'rb' ){ |f| f.read }
> > > test = `curl -shttp://phrogz.net/tmp/gkhead.jpg`
>
> > I would hazard a guess that if you took that 'b' off of the File.open,
> > you'd get the same bytes `` is returning?
>
> I doubt it, but will try when I get into work. My understanding was
> that (on Windows) opening a file without 'b' "helpfully" converts \n
> bytes to \r\n pairs; the 'b' is needed to say "Hey, don't be munging
> my data!".
>
> But like I said, I'll give it a shot.

OK, so this has nothing to do with reading files from disk. The crazy
thing is that it isn't even deterministic! See the following:

C:\>type put_bytes.rb
print (0..12000).map{ |i| ((i % 255) + 1).chr }.join
$stdout.flush
sleep 1
$stdout.flush

C:\>type get_bytes.rb
p `ruby put_bytes.rb`.length

C:\>type multiget.bat
@echo off
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb
ruby get_bytes.rb

C:\>multiget.bat
944
696
944
1192
944
919
1192
1192
944
944
1192
1192
944
1167
1192
1192
944
1192
1192
1192

Note that it also does the above with or without the sleep, and with
or without the $stdout.flush calls.

What is going on here?!