UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Perderabo,

I copied the mimetool script and am running it on an HP-UX release 11i, and in most cases it works like a charm. But I ran into the following issue;

I extracted data from an Oracle database and formatted the results as a *.csv file so that the user can view it as an excel spreadsheet. It is a relatively large file, ~12000 records. After sending it via mimetool, the file has a control character embedded roughly every 687 records. The character will appear somewhere in the data, not nescessarily at the end of the record. The character looks like the trademark charcter (™)when viewed in excel. If I ftp the file to my pc rather than emailing it, there is no issue.

If you have any ideas on this, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Carl.

Mimetool won't work with control characters. Printable ascii only. Try this script and select binary mode to send the file. That might work. Transferring binary files between platforms is dicey though.

Perderabo,

Thank you for the reply. Actually, the file is fixed column text seperated by commas. The source file does not have this control character, and if I ftp it to my pc, the file is fine. When I use mimetool, I am winding up with the character inserted into the file somehow. Ive have been using this script for extracts resulting in smaller numbers of records with great results. It is only on this larger file that I have the problem.

Thanks,
carl.

We use mimetool a lot and I've never seen it fail with ascii files. But it reliably breaks with non ascii files. So I don't know what to tell you. Maybe sending it in chunks or something. You might try the other script in binary mode anyway.

A followup to this issue. The users considered it very minor and it was left unresolved for a year. I had to make a change to the oracle script creating the file to be emailed after some database changes for another application. I had to add the statement "set cursor_sharing=exact" to the sql, and it also resolved the problem of the unwanted characters.