levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) (10/23/85)
Please, please pardon me for cluttering up your screens again if you've seen this before, but I really need to find something out and I knew it was posted some time ago (when of course I neglected to save it :-( ). A couple or so months back, somebody (I think from Raytheon Corp.) posted a question of how it would be possible to induce reads from VMS C to fetch the "hidden" first byte of each record in a file which had been previously created with Fortran carriage-control attributes. It seems that in their infinite wis- dom, the implementors of VMS C decided that reads from such a file would ignore these first bytes, as if it were being read from a printed page, I guess. Unfortunately, this makes such a file and an edited copy of it (sans attributes) look different to a VMS C program, among other difficulties (what if there is important data in that first byte?). A workaround is converting the file type (from DCL) but that is kind of awkward. Anyhow, several helpful people posted messages concerning an "undocumented" flag which could be used upon open()-ing [or maybe fopen()-ing] the file in order not to miss those first bytes when the file was read. At the time I did not have access to VMS C (only Eunice C, which did not care whether or not there were Fortran carriage-control attributes--yay Eunice I guess) so there was no occasion for me to save this. Now I have access to a VMS C compiler, and am banging my head over this problem. I contacted my friendly DEC representative, who told me he knew of no such flag, but suggested the direct use of system services (UGH!!! and highly nonportable). So I am pleading and begging for SOMEONE who remembers this or knows about this to PLEASE post or send me Unix mail (address given in .signature). I shall a thousand times over be grateful (well maybe only 999 but... :-). --Dan-- -- ------------------------------- Disclaimer: The views contained herein are | dan levy | yvel nad | my own and are not at all those of my em- | an engihacker @ | ployer or the administrator of any computer | at&t computer systems division | upon which I may hack. | skokie, illinois | -------------------------------- Path: ..!ihnp4!ttrdc!levy