kraut@ut-emx.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) (12/15/87)
here is the poop on the problems with several recent Tech Notes: When BinHex4 is used to hexify a file with a "long" name the resulting hexed file will cause BinHex4 and binhex5 to fail with a CRC-error when unhexing. However, the program xbin on UNIX-systems (does it exist on other machines? it's just a C-program, right?) succeeds in unhexing such a file, creating 3-resource files which you can then download with MacPut. You may also be able to use macbin to join those 3 resource files again and download the resulting file with a MacBinary-protocol capable program (I suspect, anyway, but have not tried this myself) Tech Notes 170 and 175 (that I am aware of) had this problem. MY prefered way of working around this bug is to use StuffIt or PackIt to first pack such files with long names, and assigning a shorter name to the output file which I then process with BinHex4 before uploading. This will assure that the original file-name is recreated when the recipient goes through the reverse process. At our site, we received Tech Note 169 damaged with some parts missing, which caused all unhexifying programs (correctly) to report an error. Several other folks here reported this problem, so I assume that it existed in the file at the originating site or was introduced nearby there. I compared a binhexed version of my own copy of TN169 with the file which arrived over the net in the hope that I'd find only minor differences which would allow me to post a short patch file which you could use to correct the broken files you already received - however, I found the difference not to be minor so I cancelled that idea. TN175 turns out to be small enough (<4k) to simply post to comp.sys.mac rather than competing with the Xmas rush of submissions to comp.mac.binaries ...(-: and I will post it shortly. TNs 169 and 170 are somewhat longer (26 and 12k, respectively) and I am still debating what to do about them. I'll make them available for FTP either here or on another machine and submit them to SUMEX and SIMTEL in the meantime while deciding if I should go stand in line at comp.mac.binaries (which I've had problems with in the past with messages not arriving at the moderators mailbox, or he forgetting to process them, or whatever .... well, I'll give it another try, I guess). Tech Note 178 also arrived broken here, but I have not found a good version of that one yet ... but expect to find it, sooner or later ... -- werner@rascal.ics.utexas.edu (prefered address) kraut@emx.cc.utexas.edu kraut@ut-emx.UUCP (or ...!ut-sally!ut-emx!kraut)