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Re: DD converts LF -> CR / LF


On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 06:52:29AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
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>According to Christopher Faylor on 5/8/2005 5:03 PM:
>>>Hmm, overriding the explicit advice of the system administrator?  How
>>>common is it for file systems to be mounted in text mode?  Why would
>>>anyone do such a thing?  If it's sufficiently rare, then dd shouldn't
>>>need to worry about it.
>> 
>> It is not rare but, regardless, this email was the result of someone who
>> was surprised by the fact that dd converted LF -> CRLF.  Whether it is
>> common or not, I don't think it makes sense to surprise people who use
>> dd when it is trivial to make it work in a more UNIX-like fashion (i.e.,
>> do not convert LF -> CRLF).
>
>The cygwin installer is being changed to more explicitly warn users that
>text-mode mounts are usually a bad idea.  The problem is that the cygwin
>system administrator is often the primary user, and is often naive about
>the issues between text vs binary mounts (especially at the point in time
>when they ran the installer).
>
>However, Paul's arguments are starting to convince me (if only because
>then I have fewer downstream patches to maintain) - respecting the
>underlying mount point unless told otherwise can also be considered a
>sensible behavior, and is adopted by several other utilities in coreutils.

As one of the project leads, I am formally asking you to make dd default
to binary behavior.  This whole thread was kicked off by someone who was
suprised by the current behavior.  I don't think there is any reason to
force people to read the man page in order to get the behavior that
they're used to on UNIX.  If you want to make it to text mode when the
dd arguments clearly indicate that you're manipulating text, then that
would be great.  Otherwise, the current and proposed behavior will just
annoy me and prevent me from writing portable scripts.  I use text mode
mounts myself and I do not desire this behavior.

So far, that seems to be two for two desiring binmode.

cgf

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