From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-09-20T11:10:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Trouble with binary files?

Steven Jenkins wrote:
> Hal Fulton wrote:
> 
>> True, but let's be fair.
>>
>> MSDOS stole many things from Unix, such as the notion of a
>> hierarchical directory structure and the use of < > | at the
>> shell level. (Many things were incompletely stolen, unfortunately.)
>>
>> The binmode/textmode distinction came from Unix. At that time
>> Unix had an EOF character of control-D (which explains the ^D we
>> still type occasionally at the terminal).
> 
> 
> No. Unix never distinguished between text and binary files. Unix did 
> (and does) interpret ASCII EOT (ctrl-d) as an end-of-input indicator for 
> terminal devices, but it never used any in-band character to mark the 
> end of a file. The EOT never got past the terminal driver, and was never 
> delivered to an application.

If Unix never distinguished between text and binary files, what
was the binary mode flag for?

Hal