UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

If you mail the file from unix as an attachment (I use uuencode) then you open the attachment to the e-mail does it preserve the line size? What application in windows do you use to view it?

Thanks for your help.

Uuencode, base64 and the like are really for binary files. If you use them for ascii files you have to worry about the CR/LF stuff yourself.

It's the same kinda thing that happens with binary verses ascii mode in ftp.

I have posted a script that can be used for this stuff. A recent thread by jwperry resulted in an improvement to the script. I have just edited the posted script to incorporate the improvement. Here is my script.

If you must use uuencode, you need to use that uxix2dos program first. But bear in mind that this expands the file to be transferred by more than 33% and consumes cpu time on both ends. That's a lot of work just to introduce this problem.

It may sound silly, but make sure line-wrapping is turned off.
And if the file is delimited in some way, or if you can get it to output delimited with commas, you can just rename the file with a .csv extension for easy importing into Excell in Windows.

Another silly little bit here- If you run into formatting problems after transferring from UNIX to WIN, try using courier new at 8 or 10. Will help you keep it all on one page (in landscape mode), without wrapping.

Now my problem is that I am trying to use the script you suggested but I can't recognize it's existence in SCO UNIX. When I try to execute it eventhough I have all the modes and permissions set up right I get "bin/ksh: not found" in response to a mimetool command.

I really am the dummy they describe in "UNIX for dummies".

It should be /usr/bin/ksh I think. The first line of the script should read:
#! /usr/bin/ksh

But for that to work you must have a /usr/bin/ksh. Does ksh run if you type "/usr/bin/ksh"?

The key to the problems I was having was that the mimetool didn't have the right paths set up for my system so once I set them up and tested the script it worked.

Now that I can view it in 132 character line lengths all I have to do is figure out how to print it (from notepad or some other windows program) with 132 character line lengths. Any ideas? I tried changing font, wordwrap only seems to apply to viewing, the file is not delimited and not printing with 132 character line lengths so if you guys have any ideas let me know.

Thanks

James