From: "Aleksi Niemelä" <aleksi.niemela@...>
Date: 2000-07-21T11:14:21+02:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04157] RE:  Inconsistent file access on Windows ports

> My Wintoys seems to behave differently with two distributions 
> and each time not in a way I'm expecting:

Let me add that during the night I vaguely remembered some kind of different
binary filehandling on DOS (if I recall correctly you could specify /b or /a
for some utilities to access the file in binary or ascii mode).

Thus

>   str = 10.chr+13.chr+10.chr+13.chr+"foo"
>   outf = File.new("foo", "w")
>   outf.write(str)

works marvellously if opening is changed to

    outf = File.new("foo", "w").binmode

The file size will be 7 and there's no extra characters.

Even so I think the question is appropriate, why two ports work differently
when writing binary data to an ascii stream? 

And of course, what's considered to be binary data? Is it /[^\w\d]/? Maybe
punctuation won't be either. And it seemed that "\n" works well too. 

	- Aleksi