U009@CCIW.BITNET (09/12/89)
> John Stiborek in North Texas asks about errors in UUENCODED > files he's received... > It shouldn't matter what kind of computer does the > transferring (VAX, IBM or whatever) since the whole point of > UUENCODING is to convert a binary file int a standard ASCII > text file that can be transferred by ANY machine, over ANY > network... Well... almost. I had a problem just last week with files I was sending to another netter from our CDC Cyber site. He too was having problems decoding the UUEncoded files I was mailing to him. As it turned out, the file type of my outbound message files was being set for me by the OS (NOS/VE) by default. It choses 60 line pages, burstable and as a result, there are 6 blank lines after every 60. Editing the received file to remove these offending blank lines fixed the transfer problem and my message upload script now presets the file to 999999 line pages, continuous form. While we were researching this problem, someone suggested the UUE format might have real blanks at the end of some lines. The Cyber, or another mailer we talk to, might have been gobbling up these and shortening the lines. It was suggested that we make the file characteristics show 132 char max lines and fill past column 80 with some text (like (<delete this>") to be trimmed at the receiving end. The UUEncoder I used, however, (UUE12/17 by David Kirschbaum, Toad Hall (kirsch@braggvax.ARPA)) seems to produce only 61 character lines (+CRLF) and none had a blank at the end. The real, hidden gotcha was that even after all these problems were solved, he still couldn't read the file because I'd ZIPped it with version 1.1 and he only had 0.97 with which to decode: crash city! Regards, Stu Beal, VE3MWM, (U009@CCIW.BITNET), National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada.