UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a .tar file consisting of text and binary files. I ftp'd the .tar file using ftp binary.

when I did the pax to unwind the tar file, I noiticed that the text files were encoded in binary.

**How would I retain the text characteristics of the ascii text files, while also keeping the binary characteristics of the binary files?

thanks

mike

i have never used pax so i have to ask, why not just use tar to unpack your tarfile?

good question. Pax was recommended to be used in the design phase. We are in the coding phase now.

Are you saying that there is a switch in 'tar' to untar? what switch would that be?

The x option to tar tells it to "untar".

Code:

tar xvf my_tar_file.tar

.
Check

Code:

man tar

for the many different things you can do with tar.

Peace
ZB
http://www.zazzybob.com

Great point on using tar -x. So I tried this and I still get binary data.

Here is the chain of the txt file....tell me if the BINARY parm of ftp caused any problems.

1) we create a tar file consisting of a txt file and adobe pdf's

2) we ftp this tar file WITH BINARY option up to a server

3) we ftp GET this tar file WITH BINARY down to our site

4) we untar/pax and the txt file is binary; the pdf's are fine

I'm not too sure why this is happening for you.
I regularly upload and download to/from my webserver a mix of plain text, HTML, .class, .tar, .gz, etc.. files, ALL using BINARY mode, and have never had any problems.

It is my understanding that using ASCII mode to transfer plain text just allows a slight performance boon by using a slighly more optimised method for encoding the data transfer. But seeing as you are ftp'ing a TAR file, you must use BINARY anyways.....

Is the file plain text to start with? What tar command are you using to bundle everything up?

I just learned that the tar is being done programmatically in java. I was told there is a java component that will issue the tar.

Very interesting.

My java friend will now do a test to executing the tar from unix proper and not from java.

thanks

m