Problems with compressed files from ftp sites

[Roger Taranto]

In article <707 at flatline.UUCP> erict at flatline.UUCP (j eric townsend) writes:
>I was trying to get tar sources from an ftp site.  They were compressed,
>no problem.  I ftp'd 'em to a local site (uhnix1), then downloaded them
>to my 3b1 via kermit.
[...]
>then there was nothing but garbage characters.  There were no errors of
>any sort during either of the file xfers, or the decompression..

Did you ftp the files in binary mode?  (I don't mean to insult your
intelligence if you did, I'm just suggesting something that might have
caused the problem.

In article <456 at limbic.UUCP> gil at limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) writes:
>I've seen this problem transfering files from a system running VAX/VMS
>and transfering the files *TO* my UNIX-pc.  I don't know whether it was
>the kermit programs I used, or whether it was the typical record-oriented
>file structure that VMS uses.

I had a problem transferring files via ftp to VMS.  What was happening was
that VMS was truncating the lines in my files to 512 bytes, even the lines
were 2008.  The solution I found was to port uudecode to VMS (it takes about
2 minutes to comment out the UNIX-specific stuff), uuencode the files on
UNIX, transfer them to VMS, and, finally, uudecode them on VMS.  I would
assume that this would work going the other direction, and it would also
eliminate non-ASCII characters from your file while it was being transferred.

-Roger
roger at binky.UUCP	...!{ucbcad,rtech,pacbell}!binky!roger