Re: FTP site problems

[johnlb@primenet.com (John Bowling)]

In article <00001bd1+00002bb7@msn.com>,
Colin Harke <Speedy_Survechay@msn.com> wrote:
>(excuse my lack of quoting but I can't figure out how)

Use 'R' instead of 'r' to reply via email, or 'F' instead of 'f' to add a 
message to the newsgroup.  This applies to most Unix news servers.

>I've had exactly the same problem on GROUND... I can't download 
>Shrinkit files, or any binary files for that matter. I believe that 
>the problem can be traced to the fact that these files contain BINARY 
>information, but have their filetype set to ASCII. This confuses LYNX 
>and it can't open it. On the other hand, HQX (BinHex) and plain text 
>documents open fine, since they are marked as text and actually 
>contain it.
>
>As of yet I have not found a way to get around this :< so I have not 
>been able to download from GROUND yet. I am currently using a 
>graphical browser on my PC, so I am going to try and see if it does 
>the same thing.. Perhaps the folks running GROUND would be able to 
>help us if we could get in touch with them (I couldn't find an E-mail 
>address on the site.)
>
The problem is that the standard web servers, graphic or text, do not
understand that .shk (and others) is a binary file, so they transfer it 
as text, with the conversion of a variety of end-of-line characters being 
translated to Unix style end-of-line.  It screws binary files totally.

Your best access is by FTP or NC-FTP which allow you to set 'bin' and 
force all transfers to be done without any translation of any characters, 
letting binaries remain pure.

There is another way of telling web browsers that specific file types are
binary, but I've never used it so I'll let someone else explain that.

John

--
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John Bowling             |Apple II GS can whip the pants off its little
johnlb@primenet.com      |brother (Mac) any time!
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