On 4 Dec 2002 Jefferis Peterson (jefferis(_at_)petersonsales(_dot_)net) wrote:
Since you're talking about FTP, you don't need to worry about
"saving as Unix". Just save it as your native format. Upload
the files to FreeBSD using FTPs "ascii" mode and it will take
care of translating to the correct format for you.
Forgive my ignorance, but my FTP program has both upload as
Text, Binary, or MacBinary. I chose Binary and it seemed to
work as it should for my rc.
Now, does binary preserve the file as ascii?
Transferring as "binary" preserves every bit. If a binary
transfer didn't cause problems, then most likely the file that
you uploaded was already in Unix format. It is safest, though, to
do an "ascii" transfer of a procmailrc or any plain text file. In
1993 I wrote this:
<http://www.ii.com/internet/ftp/archie_ftp_uncompression/>
which is still a surprisingly popular page on my site. Here's
the relevant section:
APPENDIX 2: ASCII OR BINARY TRANSFER?
To the computer a file is just a sequence of 0s and 1s. When
you do a binary transfer this sequence is preserved. When you
do an ascii transfer you are telling FTP that this is
a human-readable file and in order for it to be read on the
local host some translation may need to be done. FTP will do
the appropriate translation, which depends on the operating
systems of the remote and local hosts. Sometimes files that
most humans don't actually read need to be transferred as
ascii -- for example postscript (.ps) and rich text format (.rtf)
files. This is because the programs that use these files as input
are expecting them to be "human-readable" text files.
Here is a list of some file types and the transfer mode you should use:
File Type Transfer Mode
--------- --------------
Unformatted text file (README, *.txt, etc.) ascii
Postscript (.ps) ascii
Rich Text Format (.rtf) ascii
UUencoded file ascii
Script or Batch file (no extension, .bat, .cmd, etc.) ascii
Formatted document (.w4w, .wp, .xls, etc.) binary
Compressed file (.gz, .tar, .Z, .z, .zip, .zoo, etc.) binary
Compiled executable file (no extension, .exe, .com, etc.) binary
HTH,
Nancy
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