IN10@UDESVM.BITNET (Denis Beauchemin) (12/09/89)
I asked for some Gnu software via BITFTP at PUCC. All the files were compressed tar files (.tar.Z). After downloading them to my Sun from our beloved IBM :-(, I couldn't uncompress them. I tried both ASCII and BINARY Kermit modes and the results were the same: "Not a compressed file" (or something like that). I compared the sizes of the files I had with the ones I got from prep.ai.mit.edu and mine were always bigger. Any ideas what went wrong? I have a friend who can transfer files to his VAX via RSCS and then by Ethernet to his Sun and he didn't have better results... I don't have any problems with source files (such as shar files). I even FTPed Gnu-compress but it couldn't uncompress the other files either. Is there a place where files are uuencoded? I'm pretty sure they would work fine... [[Ed's Note: Just off the top of my head, I'd bet you are running into a problem with conversion from ASCII->EBCDIC (PUCC & Your IBM)->ASCII. The conversions 'usually' work (ie: on character data, they do pretty well), but if you are transferring things that look like binary data (binaries, compressed files, etc) then the translation tends to do bad things to your data. -bdg]]