4 ms·
Ok, now I'm curious :) Can I ask why a 'single binary stream' view of a file would cause problems when dealing with something from a 'file is actually a bunch
by MikeTheGreat 3y ago
Ok, now I'm curious :)
Can I ask why a 'single binary stream' view of a file would cause problems when dealing with something from a 'file is actually a bunch of records' system?
Like, if the FTP program sends an identical sequence of bits to the destination machine, how could the destination have problems deciphering the (identical) file?
I don't have any experience with VMS, but I'm assuming that there's information in the file (somehow, somewhere) that tells you where the records start and stop (whether it's a terminating character or a set size of each record, etc) because otherwise how would VMS know where to find each record. Is this not true? Is there information about the file that's stored outside the file?
- chasil 3y agoI am guessing that there is some interior "magic" sequence, similar to the UNIX magic in the "file" utility, that inserts some kind of padding. That is a "wild assumptive guess."
- ale42 3y agoAs far as I remember when I used VMS while at the high school, if you write a text file in VMS and then read it byte-by-byte as binary, well, there are no line separators at all. Each line is seemingly a record in the file. I don't know more about the details, but the information is not in the byte stream of the file, it's probably some metadata elsewhere in the filesystem. Other OSs don't work that way. An FTP transfer in ASCII mode will insert line breaks where appropriate while downloading from VMS, but other file types relying on records can't be reproduced outside VMS as simply.