xfer problems sco-sun

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004, Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
>Bill Vermillion propounded (on Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 08:18:23PM -0500):
...
>| Just split the each record into two pieces, swap the heard, and add
>| the rest.  I did something similar a very long time ago before the
>| xfer program existed.  As I recall it's just the first 20 bytes
>| that need to be swapped.
>
>Would that it were that simple: it's the twenty byte header at the
>beginning *of each record* that needs bytes swapped.

Complicated by the fact that the FP key and data records are fixed length
with no \n linefeed delimiter so one has to read fixed length.  I did this
with a C program years before learning perl where it would probably be only
a bit more than a one-liner.

More fun though was a FP customer running on a Radio Shack Model 16 where
disk problems created shifts in the filepro files where the key and data
files would get out of sequence (e.g. all fields past a certain record
would be shifted one byte to the left or some such, changing repeatedly
through the files).  Naturally the key and data files didn't shift at the
same places (and there weren't any backups of course :-).

Bill
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