SQ79@liverpool.ac.UK (Mark Powell) (09/13/89)
Try using a decent uudecoder/encoder. UUD and it's counterpart UUE are the best, I find. UUE sticks a table of the 64 characters using in the uuencoding before the message. This is so that any site which swaps characters (e.g. the EBCDIC sites that usually swap ~ (tilde sorry EBCDIC sites) and ^ (caret) will also swap the characters in the table as well as in the message proper. UUE can also splits long encodes into multiple messages (if you like.) UUD looks at this table and decodes using the codes in the supplied table, thus decoding correctly (we hope). Even if you get a uuencoded file without a table that has had characters converted, UUD trys to decode it using the most obvious swaps that will occur i.e. the previously mentioned tilde and caret swap and also the space characters may get changed to ` (back single quotes.) This should decode almost any file. It also checks sequence markers on the ends of the lines, if present. If you haven't got uud or uue, get them before you moan about uudecoding problems. Most archives should have them. server@uk.ac.brad.marvin has them in C source form, it's a mail server just send it a message with "help" in it. They should also be in binary & source form on the panathea server. Mark Powell ARPA : sq79%liv.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk UUCP : ...!mcvax!ukc!liv.ac.uk!sq79