[comp.sys.amiga] BROKEN FISH ALPHALIST

jwhitman@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Jerry Whitman) (03/02/89)

Last week Russ Forster kindly posted the latest version of FishLibDis
Alphabetic Listing.  Since then I have been pulling out what little hair
I have remaining.  I have come to the conclusion that either....
  a.  I do not know what I am doing.
  b.  I am doing it incorrectly
  c.  My copy is broken
  d.  All of the above

Unfortunately Russ did not specify how the listing was packaged, so I made
some semi(?) intelligent guesses.  The first line was 'BEGIN 750 ff.zoo'
so I thought it was probably ZOOed then UUENCODed.  UUDECODE did not argue
with that idea, but it did say the file was short, and reduced my 30K file
to 5K.  Immediately my deductive mind realized 'There may be a problem here'!
  
Undaunted, I pressed forward and gave the results to ZOO.  ZOO began to do 
its thing, turned pale and threw up a core dump.  Hmm, things are looking
dire Watson.  Next I stripped off the text from the original message and 
tried to run that thru UUDECODE with the same result as the previous 
execution of UUDECODE  (as it should be).

Moving onward in the face of insurmountable opportunites I decided to give
ZOO another crack at it.  I fed it a copy of the stripped out versio.
ZOO said "This archive is corrupted, get it out of here"! 

A UNIX Guru (also an AMIGA owner) and I tried several different attacks.
They were all repelled with similar disastrous results.

My first thought was that the posting was broken, but I watched the mail
and no one else seemed to be wounded.  That began to cast a shadow upon
my technical prowess. ( I know, it would be a short shadow 8^) )  

To wit....HHHHEEEEELLLLPPPPP!!!!!!  What is broken?  The original posting,
my copy, or my approach??  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  There
is a group of us here very interested in getting this listing.

Thanks in advance for the fine support this body has become know for.

Regards,  Jerry

grwalter@watmath.waterloo.edu (Fred Walter) (03/03/89)

In article <10028@louie.udel.EDU> jwhitman@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Jerry Whitman) writes:
>Last week Russ Forster kindly posted the latest version of FishLibDis
>Alphabetic Listing.  Since then I have been pulling out what little hair
>I have remaining.  I have come to the conclusion that either....
>  a.  I do not know what I am doing.
>  b.  I am doing it incorrectly
>  c.  My copy is broken

The uuencoded file had trailing spaces stripped off the ends of lines. Some
uudecodes will detect a 'short' line and just assume the missing characters
should have been spaces. Yours probably doesn't (mine didn't; sigh), so go
through the file and add spaces to the ends of lines that have the spaces
missing, until they are the same length as the other lines. Then it should
uudecode properly.

	fred

jms@antares.UUCP (Joe Smith) (03/03/89)

In article <10028@louie.udel.EDU> jwhitman@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Jerry Whitman) writes:
>Last week Russ Forster kindly posted the latest version of FishLibDis
>Alphabetic Listing.  Since then I have been pulling out what little hair
>I have remaining.  I have come to the conclusion that either....
>  a.  I do not know what I am doing.
>  b.  I am doing it incorrectly
>  c.  My copy is broken
>  d.  All of the above

	The answer is "c"

>Unfortunately Russ did not specify how the listing was packaged, so I made
>some semi(?) intelligent guesses.  The first line was 'BEGIN 750 ff.zoo'
>so I thought it was probably ZOOed then UUENCODed.  UUDECODE did not argue
>with that idea, but it did say the file was short, and reduced my 30K file

That posting came via BITNET.  BITNET has this nasty habit of padding out
each line with blanks (as in 80-character card images) and then deleting
trailing blanks when the mail is delivered.  Including deleting blanks from
lines that are supposed to have them.  Unfortunatly, Russ used an ancient
version of uuencode; the newer versions use ` instead of blank to avoid
this problem.

Therefore, to fix it, all you have to do is make sure every line is the
same length.  Add blanks to the lines that are short.  Then uudecode will
process it and zoo will be happy.  Works for me!
-- 
Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | jms@antares.Tymnet.COM or jms@opus.Tymnet.COM
McDonnell Douglas FSCO  | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!antares!jms
PO Box 49019, MS-D21    | PDP-10:JMS@F74.Tymnet.COM  CA license plate:"POPJ P,"
San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | narrator.device: "I didn't say that, my Amiga did!"

jmsc@inesc.UUCP (Miguel Casteleiro) (03/04/89)

In article <10028@louie.udel.EDU>, jwhitman@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Jerry Whitman) writes:
> Last week Russ Forster kindly posted the latest version of FishLibDis
> Alphabetic Listing.

  [...]

> To wit....HHHHEEEEELLLLPPPPP!!!!!!  What is broken?  The original posting,
> my copy, or my approach??

  I think the original posting is broken, I coulnd't uudecode it too.