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doscp doscat line endings CRLF conversions

In "vi", you can ":set ff=dos" to set NL/CR correctly (or ":set ff=unix" and ":set ff=mac" too).

Nowadays, you may run into UTF-16 also.

From: rja.carnegie@excite.com (Robert Carnegie)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Problems using doscp -r for import to access database
Date: 10 Sep 2001 03:28:49 -0700
Message-ID: <f3f18bc0.0109100228.2f60f9f2@posting.google.com> 

btors@aol.com (BTors) wrote in message news:<20010906194224.17035.00000352@mb-cg.aol.com>...
> Robert:
> 
> Thanks for your reply!

I made one quite big mistake, see below...

> Just to clarify and answer some of your questions:
> 
> 1) There are no spaces in the file name.
> 2) It isn't too long only 5 characters
> 3)Using SCO Openserver 5.0.5
> 4) Tried doscp -m and it didn't work from command line. ( Didn't import
> correctly)
> 4a) doscp -r works from command line.

Ah.  Well, if the report program generating the file (we haven't discussed
that program) is creating a file with MS-DOS style line feeds, then
"doscp -m" will probably break it instead of fixing it.

> 5) I guess it isn't EOF mark. Looks like a single line with nothing on it but
> character that looks like paragraph symbol in word or notepad ( sorry I'm a
> beginner).

Could be ASCII 20 (hex 14), IBM 244 (hex F4), or Windows character 182
(hex B6), but I'm not aware that any of them mean anything much - 20
could be a control code for old Epson printers...?

Perhaps it would be healthier to strip it out of the file - the filter
'cat $fname.txt | tr -d \\024 >${fname}2.txt' will do that, if it's 20.

(\ here introduces an octal - number base 8 - character code, but it's
also the special 'escape' character in shell commands so that other
special characters lose their special effect - echo here\'s an example -
and so \\ is used so that the first \ tells the shell not to treat the
second \ as \, but to give it to 'tr'.  Actually 'tr -d "\024" would do ;-)

> 6) xtod didn't work either - I tried that
> 7) There is no error from doscp command.
> 8) I would love to use FTP but the computer isn't networked. THAT
>    wasn't my decision believe me!
> 9) Yes, my script does copy the right file but wrongly, from the command
>    line it works okay.

Still not sure how _that's_ happening.  If before your script was
called, a shell function named "doscp" had been defined -
which is just mean, frankly - you could specify /usr/bin/doscp...

> 10) In vi editor prior to converting there is no last line in the file.

"Incomplete last line" (no line feed at the end)?  "echo >>$fname.txt"
if you want one - and if the last line doesn't consist of ASCII code 20
and you decide to remove that.  Perhaps "echo \\r >>$fname.txt",
since you probably want the file to be Microsoft-style -
'echo "\r"' is carriage return.

> 11) I'll try the file inspection and doscat.

My big mistake here - mentioning "doscat" without considering that
it also requires a switch to enforce "raw" reading of data, without
conversion: "doscat -r device:filename.ext" .  Otherwise, what
you see would _not_ be what you just got - it would do another
conversion and show you that, instead - missing the whole point.

I usually use "debug" on files in MS-DOS or Windows, because I'm hard. ;-)

> 12) I'll give it one more try.

Good luck!
 

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