From: Tim Hammerquist <tim@...>
Date: 2003-09-20T18:43:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Trouble with binary files?

YANAGAWA Kazuhisa graced us by uttering:
> For ANSI-C compliance.  From fopen(3) of FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE:
>
>      The mode string can also include the letter ``b'' either
>      as a third char- acter or as a character between the
>      characters in any of the two-charac- ter strings described
>      above.  This is strictly for compatibility with ISO/IEC
>      9899:1990 (``ISO C89'') and has no effect; the ``b'' is
>      ignored.
>
> I believe most of Unix like platforms stand on a similar
> position.

fopen(3) on my Debian box adds:
    [...]; the ``b'' is ignored on all POSIX conforming systems,
    including Linux.  (Other systems may treat text files and
    binary files differently, and adding the ``b'' may be a good
    idea if you do I/O to a binary file and expect that your
    program may be ported to non-Unix environments.)

If the POSIX standard dictates that 'b' is ignored, it must also
dictate that binary and text files are treated identically, no?

[...checking...]

Correct. From the POSIX spec
<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/toc.htm>:

    The character 'b' shall have no effect, but is allowed for
    ISO C standard conformance.

(That's the subjunctive mood, so any implementation that is
affected by the 'b' flag is _not_ POSIX compliant.)

And from dmr's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (C)1974
<http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.html>:

    III. THE FILE SYSTEM
<snip>
    3.1 Ordinary files

    A file contains whatever information the user places on it,
    for example, symbolic or binary (object) programs. No
    particular structuring is expected by the system. A file of
    text consists simply of a string of characters, with lines
    demarcated by the newline character. Binary programs are
    sequences of words as they will appear in core memory when
    the program starts executing. A few user programs manipulate
    files with more structure; for example, the assembler
    generates, and the loader expects, an object file in a
    particular format. However, the structure of files is
    controlled by the programs that use them, not by the system. 

This seems to be a CPM/DOS/Win32 issue.

Cheers,
Tim Hammerquist
-- 
Did I mention that I can't tell you how to get rich?
If I could, I'd be rich, and not here.
    -- Martien Verbruggen in comp.lang.perl.misc