UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I saw a few posts on this, however, I am getting an error and don't see this particular issue. Not right off anyways....

We moved from digital OS to solaris 9 in Jan.
On the old platform, I could gzip my files, ftp them to my win2000 desktop via hummingbird and then unzip them to view.

Now, I get the meta characters in the file when I go to view them.

I have tried compress, gzip, zip. Nothing gives me a clean file on the win2000 side.

These files are pulled up to view by a non-unix knowledgeable person so they need to be in a format that can easily be openned from the win2000 side.

help.

transfer in 'binary' mode if you have gzip-ed files:

ftp> bin

Doesnt work. :-(

Doesnt work. :-(

pls don't bump the posts!

Meta characters in unix are characters that the shell interprets in a special manner such as * or ?. It's incredible that the old platform was stripping these and odd that you wanted it to. Oh well.... Just first send the file through "tr -d" to strip whatever characters you want to disappear. "tr -d" can remove any character and you will have total control over which characters get stripped.

I didnt bump the post, I got an error on the original post didn't see it come through so I posted again. sorry

A little background... these are audit reports that are supposed to be viewed by someone who has no access to the unix commands that could possibly alter them at the unix level. The reports take up a lot of disk space and we have to keep them for a year so as standard process, we compress stored reports and files. On the old server I accomplished the access requirement by having the reports viewed via our hummingbird desktop ftp software. the reports came up fine after going through the zip utility on the desktop.

Now they don't on the new platform. I get some little boxes and other strange characters (perhaps not true meta characters) imedded in the report and the whole report format is thrown off when they are zipped coming from the server. If they are in plain txt format they are fine.

Hummingbird has a lot of options and I tried a few, but haven't resolved this issue.