m692020@sdsu.UUCP (Thomas E Middleton) (05/03/87)
(Is there still a line eater problem? If so this is for it.) Uhh, sorry but I posted a question without my .signature and then posted the .signature but cancelled the question. Hey, it was saturday and I was in a hurry to get away from the computer. Anyway, this is a repeat. 1) Does anyone know where magic numbers are documented/discussed? I saw some discussion on the subject recently but didn't catch any comments on where to find an explanation of them. (These are the numbers that say a file is executable, etc. used by 'more'.) 2) The 'file' command tells me some of my files are English text and others are ASCII text. They looked the same to me so I was wondering what made the difference. I checked for control characters and special non-printing chars but there didn't seem to be any differences there. The only thing that was consistent was line length greater than 80 characters. It seems that if I had an English text file and added chars to each line to exceed 80 then it was thereafter referred to as ASCII text. 2b) In general does anyone know how the 'file' program decides what is what and if it uses the magic numbers at all. 3) When I had some lines at exactly 80 characters plus a newline it seems that 'more' would lose the newline so that the next line all printed on char position 80 on the crt. 'cat' had no problem with the same file. Note that this only occured with exactly 80 chars plus a newline, both longer and shorter lines seemed to be o.k. With shorter lines the newline worked so the next line was the next line, with longer lines 'more' would wrap the line around onto the next line and then output a proper newline. But with a paragraph of 80 char lines only one (very long) line is output. Have others observed this? Is it a bug? Am I a bug? (don't answer that) Anyway, you'd probably be doing other netters a favor by mailing me the answers to above directly. If other people are interested they can let me know and I'll forward the answer or if a lot of interest is generated I'll post the answers. (my address is sdcsvax!sdsu!m692020 just in case my .signature account doesn't get appended) -- "I'm not schizophrenic." Thomas Earl Middleton "And I'm not paranoid." aka Tem, Tom, Bear, Bare "So would everyone please leave us alone!" UUCP sdcsvax!sdsu!m692020