On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote: > For me, one of the enormous advantages of saying bye bye to the > Microsoft atrocities is the ability to forget about that distinction, > text mode vs. binary mode. Data are compressed and uncompressed, > uploaded and downloaded, without ever once having to give a second > thought to those modes, which are nowadays only booby traps. Really? FTP still has ASCII mode and binary mode. Furthermore, depending on which version of Unix or Linux you use, the default will be different. For example, Solaris 8 and earlier defaulted to ASCII mode when you connected to another machine with FTP. Solaris 9 and later default to binary mode. Thankfully, ncftp seems to have always defaulted to binary mode. Then, when you have to read a file produced in Windows or DOS, you might have to convert the end-of-line characters. All of this would be a non-issue if everybody would agree on the same end-of-line convention, but there seems to be this notion that making things incompatible will ensure that nobody will switch from one OS to another.
