Fergus Henderson wrote: > That solution would be fine, if you were designing a new OS. > But we're not! We're trying to be compatible with an existing OS. Yes and no. As far as I understand, one of the goals of gnuwin32 is to minimize the burden of porting unix tools to windos. From that perspective, gnuwin32 have to provide a unix-like way of computing for these tools. There are a waste of unix text tools that have '\n' hardcoded. I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's just how it is today. Further on, I guess we don't want to unnecessarily contaminate the stdio with a filthy text/binary i/o paradigm. Therefore, if we want to have access to these tools on the windos platform, and have better things to do than rewriting existing unix tools, we have to find a way to serve these tools with under-the-cover end-of-line translations. The question is: HOW? text=binary/text!=binary is one possible (and existing) solution. Another possible solution could be to map file extensions to the appropriate mode. And I'm sure we all have our own favorite solution :) Somewhere along the line someone has to decide what the primary task of gnuwin32 is. It cannot possibly solve every problem that occur when trying to merge two incompatible programming platforms. I was hoping that one primary goal of gnuwin32 would be to compile and run unix tools on the windos platform without modifications. That would be something, and we're pretty close already! We ought to be thankful to Cygnus for their honorable initiative, and to all of you contributing to making gnuwin32 even better. Live in peace! -- Tomas Fasth mailto:tomas.fasth@euronetics.com EuroNetics Operation http://euronetics.com Mjärdevi Science Park Office tel: +46 13 218 181 Teknikringen 1 E Office fax: +46 13 218 182 58330 Linköping Mobile tel: +46 708 870 957 Sweden Mobile fax: +46 708 870 258 - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request@cygnus.com" with one line of text: "help".