GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) (09/22/88)
After re-reading an earlier message it seems worth mentioning
that UUENCODEd files can not be directly fed into PKXARC or PKUNPAK;
instead, they must first be filtered thru a program called UUDECODE.
While e-mail works well with text files (i.e., files viewable with
something like DOS' TYPE command) it fails miserably with binary
files in most cases. To get around this shortcoming, several
algorithms have been devised to transform binary into text files.
UUENCODE/UUDECODE is a pair of programs implementing perhaps the
most popular of these algorithms. The developers of Kermit use
a different one, called BOO, to distribute their program. Once
you've received a UUENCODED file from the net, you must first pass it
thru the corresponding reverse filter, UUDECODE, to transform it
back into a binary file. Otherwise, you'll fail miserably when
trying to use as a binary file what's really still a text file.
If you don't have UUENCODE/UUDECODE, try a local bulletin
board. The versions for PCs are generic MS-DOS versions so you
don't need to restrict your search to Rainbow bbs's. Or, if you
have a C or pascal compiler, source code for these public domain
utilities can be sent to you. (No, I'll not send out the compiled
versions :-) You _should_ have these utilities if you plan on
retrieving programs from the net.
George
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