walton%Deimos@CIT-HAMLET.ARPA (10/03/85)
If one has two VMS Vaxes connected together with RS-232 ports, binary files will transfer OK, using 8-bit data. The catch is that Kermit cannot possibly be taught about all of the wild and wonderful RMS file formats (how many are there? 1.0e10?), so making a BACKUP set (which contains the RMS formats) and transferring it via Kermit will work fine. Except that the BACKUP set won't arrive at the other end with the correct format either. Hence, the solution we have used at Caltech: Make a BACKUP set with some large block-size on disk. Transfer it via KERMIT after doing a SET FILE TYPE BINARY at both ends. This will result in the file being received as a 512-byte fixed-length-record file. Then, use any RMS file attribute changing program to change the file format back to n-byte records with no record attributes (where n is the size used to create the backup set on the first machine), and extract the contents via BACKUP on the new machine. The advantage of this method is that the file transfer goes twice as fast, because you don't have to translate each 8-bit byte into two 8-bit ASCII characters. (If ASCI2BIN is smarter than this, please tell me.) Steve Walton Caltech Solar Astronomy walton@citdeimo.bitnet walton%deimos@cit-hamlet.arpa ...!ucbvax!cithep!hamlet#walton@deimos OR ...!psuvax1!walton@citdeimo.bitnet