FTP Binary , ASCII

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 05:46:14PM -0500, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-08-22 at 17:19, littleguru wrote:
> > Hello
> > 
> > I as reading a book related to cgi scripts , and it mentioned that we 
> > shouldn't upload
> > scripts through Binary mode , because they will not work .
> > Would you please explain to me what is the difference between these two 
> > , when is the
> > best time to upload with each of them .
> 
> MS-DOS/Windows editors end all lines of text with <CR><LF> pairs, while
> UNIX text uses only single <LF> characters (a.k.a. <NL> or "new line"). 

Historically, it is more than just scripts and  new line  <CR><LF> pairs

In ASCII mode the most significant bit of a byte can be stripped and
used by ftp.  Since no ASCII character uses this bit this is fine for
text (see the man page for ASCII).  HOWEVER lots of content now is
richer than the 7bits in a ftp ASCII transfer.   

Look at /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf give some attention to this topic.
The classic binary/ascii differences can be confused.

    # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore
    # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII
    # mangling on files when in ASCII mode.
    ....

Depending on the client and server pair anything except binary can be confusing.


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Just say no to 74LS73 in 2004