Re: Help w/ GIF binaries

[jimwong@owlnet.rice.edu (Jim Wong)]

GIFs (and other binary files) are encoded before they are posted to the
various ".binaries" newsgroups.  This is necessary because some machines that
propagate Usenet news don't have eight-bit character sets, and would pass
on corrupt versions of anything they received that wasn't expressible in
seven bit characters.

Different newsgroups use different methods for encoding binary files;
your GIFs are most likely uuencoded.  Check around some ftp sites for
a uudecode program to restore them to their original format.

-- 
Jim Wong (jimwong@owlnet.rice.edu)