w_smith@wookie.DEC.COM (Willie Smith, LTN Components Eng.) (06/06/87)
I just (moments ago) finished the Z-80 assembly version of
UUDECODE. Thanks to all those who sent me mail, I was unable to
reply due to problems finding paths back to you. A few questions
still remain however:
1) What on earth is the 'mode' number? That's the number that shows
up between "begin" and the filename on the header line of a
UUENCODEd file. I'm just ignoring it, is that safe?
2) The Eunichs online 'manual' claims that "the body is terminated
by a line with a count of zero. This line consists of one
ASCII space." However, the UUENCODE I got from SIMTEL20 does
not conform to this, but rather sticks a "`" (60H) into the file,
which being an out of band character, I guess is supposed to
signal something. Which is right? I'm currently calling it an
error and closing the file properly (which works), but this makes
me nervous....
3) The online 'manual' says that each line can be up to 62 characters
long, including the trailing newline. What is meant by 'newline'?
Is it CR, or LF, or both, or what?
4) Is there a real honest-to-gloz protocol definition out there
somewhere that someone could send me? Please don't tell me
to RTFM, the nearest Eunichs machine is miles away, and I can
only talk to it thru our network.
5) I find that my program tends to stick on a final sector full of
NULL bytes. This causes strange things to happen with CRC
checking. How can I get the total byte count of the output
file by looking at the UUENCODEd file? I suspect that this
may go away when I figure out what the 'right' way of terminating
the file is.
Teaser: Once I get all this info together, I can write the encoder and
submit them both to SIMTEL20. The decoder seems to run
about 7 times as fast as the PASCAL version that's floating
around [your milage may vary, I have a hard disk cache...].
The size of the decoder executable is 3.125 K bytes, less than
one third the size of the PASCAL version. Anyone want to be a
Beta test site?
Willie Smith
w_smith@wookie.dec.com
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