Re: (tye)Re: Platform Differences

Newlines cause other problems than just cross-platform transfert.
As read in perlport :

Due to the ``text'' mode translation, DOSish perls have limitations of using seek
and tell when a file is being accessed in ``text'' mode.
Specifically, if you stick to seek-ing to locations you got from tell (and no others),
you are usually free to use seek and tell even in ``text'' mode.
In general, using seek or tell or other file operations that count bytes instead of characters,
without considering the length of \n, may be non-portable.
If you use binmode on a file, however, you can usually use seek and tell with arbitrary values quite safely.

"Only Bad Coders Code Badly In Perl" (OBC2BIP)

Comment on Re: (tye)Re: Platform Differences

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(tye)Re2: Platform Differences by tye (Sage) on Aug 07, 2001 at 21:33 UTC
For what it's worth, I don't consider this a problem with newlines either. That is just a standard limitation of C's seek() for non-byte-stream files. I never use seek to skip byte offsets. MacOS has a different newline but has byte-stream files. Other operating systems don't even have newlines and don't have byte-stream files and so tell doesn't give you a byte offset anyway (if gives you a record number and an offset within that, for example). - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]

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(tye)Re2: Platform Differences
by tye (Sage) on Aug 07, 2001 at 21:33 UTC

For what it's worth, I don't consider this a problem with newlines either. That is just a standard limitation of C's seek() for non-byte-stream files. I never use seek to skip byte offsets. MacOS has a different newline but has byte-stream files. Other operating systems don't even have newlines and don't have byte-stream files and so tell doesn't give you a byte offset anyway (if gives you a record number and an offset within that, for example).

tye

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