beattie@netsys.UUCP (Brian Beattie) (11/29/87)
I have seen several references to versions of awk and sed running under minix. I would like very much to get a copy of these things if possible could any-one with info please drop me a line? Thanx -- Brian Beattie ...netsys!beattie 11525 Hickory Cluster Reston VA 22090 (703)477@cher
mmdf@udel.UUCP (11/30/87)
Greetings! As far as I can see, the awk and sed sources still haven't made it into BITNET -- could a reposting be made? If I'm wrong, and they're out there somewhere, could someone arrange to have them installed on LISTSERV with the other stuff? While I'm writing anyway; Source code posted to BITNET would cause us much fewer headaches if it were uuencoded. BITNET has (as we all know) a way of clobbering C source... Happy Hacking! -tih
ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (12/01/87)
In article <750@louie.udel.EDU> THELBEKK%NORUNIT.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes: >Greetings! As far as I can see, the awk and sed sources still >haven't made it into BITNET -- could a reposting be made? Is this, in fact true? If so, I can repost. I would rather not uuencode if I don't have to since that will increase the volume by tens of kilobytes. What does BITNET actual do? If it just mungs tabs or something simple, I can replace all the tabs with ! or ? or some other character that is not otherwise used. To help you figure out what BITNET does, here is a listing of my keyboard, row for row: lower-case: 1234567890-= qwertyuiop[] asdfghjkl;'` \zxcvbnm,./ upper-case !@#$%^&*()_+ QWERTYUIOP{} ASDFGHJKL:"~ |ZXCVBNM<>? 3 tabs followed by an x x Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)
THELBEKK%NORUNIT.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (12/16/87)
Andy asked what BITNET really does... His keyboard test looks good to me, but what it doesn't show is what happens to tabs. When source files reach my site, every tab is expanded to exactly four spaces, no matter where it is on a line. This isn't *too* bad -- it only makes the sources look ugly... ;-) -tih
BECKER%HUMBER.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Bruce Becker) (12/16/87)
Just a note on response to Andy's character-test: I am using a Vt102 terminal emulator on an Amiga 1000, talkin to an IBM mainframe with a Series-1 front-end running the Yale 3270 emulator - all this to talk to BitNet... In any case, as far as I can tell, the characters sent are the characters received. I'm not sure if the tabs are sent or of they have been converted to spaces by the time I see them, but for source code this is a minor quibble... Cheers, Bruce Becker Humber College Etobicoke, Ont.
FYS-MA%FINTUVM.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Matti Aarnio) (12/17/87)
>Andy asked what BITNET really does... His keyboard test looks >good to me, but what it doesn't show is what happens to tabs. >When source files reach my site, every tab is expanded to exactly >four spaces, no matter where it is on a line. This isn't *too* >bad -- it only makes the sources look ugly... ;-) > >-tih I think BITNET (or gateway mailer) does also something else. Just on recent pr.c -posting (arrived to me last night as was this post also) there is an usage info line, that has been cut to half between -h, and -w explanations. On BITNET mails have NEVER longer lines than 80 chars ! (Something to do with IBM networking using RSCS protocols) Sometimes gateways are 'smart', they wrap excessive tails to next line, but some simply zap the tail off... Fortunately later is becoming rare, but I have seen it from time to time. I have also observed MAIL FILE-TAIL-EATER phenomena, that is: last line of posting is lost ! Propably this is only our NETNEWS systems trouble, but anyway it is distracting. ('Bug-busters' are searching it already) Allways add "<Food for tail-eater>", at least to **ENCODE:d postings. There is also question about EBCDIC. You know ASCII is (with 7 lowmost bits) same everywere, but EBCDIC ISN'T ! On EBCDIC (Extended BCD -- originally for numbers only ?) nearly every coutry (if not every installation) have different character sets. When you type bracket (lets say: left), I may get it to my screen, or I may get dollar-sign, or number-sign, or most propably upper- case A-umlaut (eg: A+"). This trouble is present with nearly all special characters. Also translating ASCII->EBCDIC->ASCII can change characters; example: Your exclamation mark changes to my dollar- sign. -- I know, somebody has bad EBCDIC<->ASCII table -- propably I do. ( Even more propable, I have bad EBCDIC->EBCDIC tables for my terminal. How did you suppose IBM creates "national" character sets ? ) ( IBM creates standards ;-), but why totally new for every country ? ) Least troubles to us behind BITNET would come, if source postings would be UUENCODE:d with "BITNET compatible" UUENCODE, that is: letters, numbers and limited set of special characters are allowed. They go thru nicely. There has been discussion about this recently. (Either on this MINIX-list or on INFO-HAMS) Idea of "Kermit Batch Mode Transfer" isn't too bad. But as it would be "Yet Another F.T.P.", maybe we still should stick on UU**CODE. / Matti Aarnio +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Mr. Matti E. Aarnio; University of Turku; Wihuri Physical laboratory;| | SF-20500 TURKU; FINLAND (Phone:+358-21-645917)| | BITNET: FYS-MA at FINTUVM (( GMT+2 )) | | Internet: FYS-MA%FINTUVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ << Food for file-tail-eater >>
ncoverby@ndsuvax.UUCP (Glen Overby) (12/19/87)
In article <1768@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >In article <750@louie.udel.EDU> THELBEKK%NORUNIT.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes: >>Greetings! As far as I can see, the awk and sed sources still >>haven't made it into BITNET -- could a reposting be made? >> >Is this, in fact true? If so, I can repost. I can't recall if it has made it to MINIX-L on Bitnet, but I do know that it is on the archive server for Bitnet on the LISTSERV at NDSUVM1 (I maintain this). Other networks can access this mail, but it works best for people on BitNet due to the 80-column restriction on mail. > I would rather not uuencode >if I don't have to since that will increase the volume by tens of kilobytes. >What does BITNET actual do? If it just mungs tabs or something simple, I >can replace all the tabs with ! or ? or some other character that is not >otherwise used. BitNet has always been a problem. First of all, they run an IBM protocol which limits lines to 80 characters. To get around this, IBM has come up with TWO "packetising" techniques ("DISK DUMP and "NETDATA" to those unfortunate enough to know) which combine short lines and break up long ones. Unfortunately, mail does not use either of these techniques, so lines over 80 characters long either get truncated or wrapped (depending on what software you're using and how it is feeling today). I feel that the BitNet people should come up with some solution of their own to make themselves compatable with the rest of the world, rather than the rest of the world changing to accomodate the IBM world. There is no reason that all other networks should suffer the increased load of uuencoded sources or manually translated characters just because of brain dammage on BitNet. For a long time we at NDSU recieved all of our news over BitNet, and I worked around the problem of wrapped lines and expanded tabs (translation tables were no problem, fortunately). So what comes across BitNet *IS* useable; it just takes some work, and a few different techniques. Of the problems I ran into, the biggest was tab expansion. I worked around this problem with patches by using "patch" with the "loose" option (-l). Wrapped lines showed up on the filenames of the shar archives and on a few comments (a linefeed between * and / on a terminating comment). These are readily visible in sources that use 'sed' and start all lines with a 'X', but had to be manually fixed. Translation tables have not plagued me with Minix sources, but it still exists. The problem comes from the lack of a standard EBCDIC to ASCII translation, as well as internal inconsitiencies in EBCDIC. Curly braces ( { } ) are a classic one (There are two sets of them; one for IBM's "TN" print train and another for the "PN" train. IBM terminals NORMALLY use the "PN" ones, but many Unix systems use the "TN" one. And a major mail gateway to BitNet is a Unix machine). Tabs are an even worse situation. IBM's editors do not use tab characters, but instead display them as a strange character or something (depending on how you connect to your IBM). As a result, the gateways expand tabs. Most gateways will expand tabs on a FOUR character boundary rather than 8. So, in short, the problems with BitNet can be worked around by the people on that network so rest of us don't have to suffer for it. Or would you prefer to go back to using punched cards? >Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) -- Glen Overby Bitnet: ncoverby@ndsuvax UUCP: uunet!ndsuvax!ncoverby