UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Yeah tht is what it was...the guy who was sending these files wasnt taking care of spaces and the MF program was putting junk in place of these spaces.

He sent another file and the commands worked fine on them. Thanks for your help guys!

would you need a special tool to look at data files that me be in use by the kernal. I guess you could cat filename.dat >filenametext.dat that way and give it a try.

This could be possible where files doenst have '\n' as the line delimiter and instead some other character as the line delimiter which would be processed by special preprocessors.

Basically head and tail would assume for default line delimites as '\n' ( I hope so, correct me if am wrong )
So MF files could be of that format, and using file <filename> isnt a real good clue to find out why isnt working, as it would be filled up with mere ascii characters.

One more good example would be bibliographic exchange ( transformation ) file formats conforming to MARC standards, where the line delimiters are not '\n' by standards.

For such files default unix tools would nt work though!

Code:

 od -c filename.dat

will produce output. If you know what the file iis supposed to contain, you can deduce what the carriage control character(s) are. Mainframes frequently use leading characters as channel control words (2 bytes). These tell the system how long the line following the control word is. There is also FORTRAN carriage comntrol which uses leading bytes.