Thanks to all of you for the responses. I'm trying to re-learn, eventually master, programming in Ada. As simple learning exercises, I'm trying to perform **minimal** emulation of several UNIX/Linux tools/utilities (such as grep, cat, head, wc, etc) using Ada. I'd like to avoid disabling my terminal by using any of these emulations on a "binary" file, so I'd like to use "file" or "perl -T" in Ada via a system call. I'm not good enough at Ada at this point to enable my own "-T" file operator, but that's one of the many things I'm aiming for. I'd sure like to know how Perl determines ("heuristic guess" says perldoc!) that the file is or is not a binary so that I can do that in Ada. I like the warning I get when using "less" with a file with binary content; it warns me! How does it determine that? The problem I still have with the Perl one-liner is that I don't know how to embed the filename I want to query inside double quotes or how to escape the slash path separators so that it is not interpreted as a regex. The reason why I went with the "perl -T" route over the "file" route was that I wanted a simple "text" or "binary" response, nothing I needed to parse further. Thanks, Ken Wolcott

In reply to Re^3: How to use the -T file op as a one-liner by kwolcott
in thread How to use the -T file op as a one-liner by kwolcott

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