xfer problems sco-sun

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 08:57:52AM -0500, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> > Ending the files with a line feed would make it easier to
> > manipulate them with standard tools.
> 
> What tools can be defined as standard.

"The tools that ship with my distribution."

> I've seen many thing over the years with built in line length
> limits.  One problem I recall with at least earlier MS
> implementations was line length limitations in the order of 500
> bytes.  I don't know if that has been changed.

Excuse me: "The tools that ship with my *Linux* distribution."

> I remember on old Unix systems when there were few tools going into
> a hex editor to add 'nl's ever so often in a large file in order to
> get it to read into vi with the the 'line too long' error.

Yeah; vim doesn't have that problem; I've successfully read and written
multi-megabyte files with 3 (count 'em, 3) LF's.

> I don't know what the current limit is in many, but I just brought
> a key file into vi to look at it and find that it is 3 lines long.
> Using $ to go to the end of the the line shows that line to be
> 22071 lines long.

Yep.

> My personal opinion of the MS line terminated approach to
> fixed-length databases, is that they didn't seem to grasp the idea
> of fixed length, as so many in the MS world early on seem to come
> from a sequential access world, and the speed, or lack thereof,
> showed this approach.
> 
> However many databases are still stuck in the past and I've seen at
> least a couple that take advantage of more modern approaches and
> the standard editing tools would never work.

Indeed.  But, as the other poster noted, "fixed length" is not
incompatible with "looks like a text file".  As long as you're careful
with your text editor, it can be a very useful technique in certain
circumstances.

> On the old 3B2 I remember it was using the largest 5.25" HD drives
> available at that time - 70MB CDC drives.  If you needed larger
> capacity your only alternative was the 8" hard drives. This was
> because the maximum amount of data on a disk platter was limited by
> the technology of the day.

You were running Oracle on a *3B2*??

Above and beyond the call.  Really.

> But as I look at things changing things for reasons such as 'easier
> to use', 'use standard tools' 'everyone else does it like that' is
> always the successful way.   My POV is that if you are going to
> change don't follow the world, find a better way of doing things,
> as being a copycat is not usually the way to financial success.

Depends on your goals.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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        "They had engineers in my day, too."  -- Perry Vance Nelson