ABSTINE@CLVMS.BITNET (Art Stine) (08/19/86)
Has anyone ever had to convert a 512byte fixed length file to true UNIX style stream format? Using CONVERT, we get a file that still has a max record length of 512, no matter what we specify as the size in the FDL to convert it. The problem is that convert is putting a LF at the end of each 512 byte record and ends up messing up the data... What this is for is TeX. We have a routine which converts from TeX DVI to Postscript and the routine is written in C. The routine is expecting just a stream of bytes, no record blocking. One of our programmers is currently using a Pascal program to convert the binary DVI to an ASCII dump and then using a C program to read the dump and convert it back to stream binary. The output from the C program makes ANALYZE/RMS lose its lunch, since it doesn't seem to conform to RMS. But the DVI2PS C program will read it, no sweat. Any ideas? Art Stine Systems Programmer Clarkson University Educational Resources Center Potsdam, NY 13676 Phone: (315)268-2292 BITNET: ABSTINE@CLVMS
amr@rti-sel.UUCP.UUCP (08/25/86)
In article <8608190243.AA24449@ucbjade.Berkeley.Edu> ABSTINE@CLVMS.BITNET.UUCP writes: >Has anyone ever had to convert a 512byte fixed length file to true UNIX >style stream format? . . . > >Any ideas? > >Art Stine Faced with a closely-related problem (TeX DVI files and a PASCAL DVI-to-Impress program), I avoided the issue. I wrote modules that replaced the PASCAL I/O calls. These were FORTRAN (yes FORTRAN) subroutines which mapped the DVI file as a section, and then handled it as a simple vector of bytes along with a pointer to the current location. I realize it may sound complicated, but the system services needed to map the file aren't really very tough. Your source (512 byte, fixed length, unformatted data) is an easy target to map to since # of records <--> number of pages, and there should be nothing in the file that isn't part of the byte stream. I think you'll find it significantly faster than ASCIIfying the DVI and then back- converting to binary. -- Cheers, Alan Roberts Research Triangle Institute (decvax!mcnc!rti-sel!amr)