On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Deedra Waters wrote: > I'm using pine to look at news groups. right now, the two that I look at, > pine keeps taking attachments, and puttin them in the message, is there a > way to change this? or is there a better news reader I can use so that I > won't have this problem? I'm presuming you're referring to things like this: begin 600 popsong.mp3 Followed by random-looking text. This is not pine's fault, this is how it was posted. This is what's called uuencoding. This turns a binary file into text so that you can do just this - post it in a message. this is pretty old technology, but is guaranteed to be backward compatibal. You can unpack such files by exporting the text to a text file, stripping off the extraneous headers and footers (if there are any), and then runing it through uudecode. The filename is stipulated in the begin line of the uuencoded file (as shown above), and so are the permissions (that's the 600, 755 is also common). The named file will be created by uudecode in your current directory. The reason why pine can't deal with these internally is that often in newsgroups, the posting is split across several articles and one has to find all the pieces and reassemble them before decoding. If you're missing a piece, you're probably hosed, depending on what the file is. Geoff.
