* overview2.sgml: Remove reference to CYGWIN=binmode.

* textbinary.sgml: Ditto.  Rephrase certain paragraphs to match
	Cygwin 1.7 behaviour.  Add popen(3) and pipe(2) behaviour.  Make
	quite clear that binmode is preferred.  Add *mode.o files to
	description for developers.
This commit is contained in:
Corinna Vinschen 2009-03-18 11:05:45 +00:00
parent 2e13058eac
commit 1233ba242b
3 changed files with 99 additions and 41 deletions

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@ -1,3 +1,11 @@
2009-03-18 Corinna Vinschen <corinna@vinschen.de>
* overview2.sgml: Remove reference to CYGWIN=binmode.
* textbinary.sgml: Ditto. Rephrase certain paragraphs to match
Cygwin 1.7 behaviour. Add popen(3) and pipe(2) behaviour. Make
quite clear that binmode is preferred. Add *mode.o files to
description for developers.
2009-03-09 Corinna Vinschen <corinna@vinschen.de>
* pathnames.sgml: Try to be more clear explain raw devices.

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@ -245,7 +245,7 @@ Win32 paths containing drive letter and/or backslashes as well as UNC paths
<sect2 id="ov-hi-textvsbinary"><title>Text Mode vs. Binary Mode</title>
<para>Interoperability with other Win32 programs such as text editors was
critical to the success of the port of the development tools. Most Red Hat
critical to the success in the early days of Cygwin. Most Red Hat
customers upgrading from the older DOS-hosted toolchains expected the new
Win32-hosted ones to continue to work with their old development
sources.</para>
@ -258,8 +258,8 @@ the fly by Cygwin into a single newline when reading in text mode.</para>
violating the POSIX standard that states that text and binary mode will be
identical. Consequently, processes that attempt to lseek through text files can
no longer rely on the number of bytes read as an accurate indicator of position
in the file. For this reason, the CYGWIN environment variable can be
set to override this behavior.</para>
in the file. For this reason, Cygwin allows to choose the mode in which to
read a file in several ways.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="ov-hi-ansiclib"><title>ANSI C Library</title>

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@ -33,6 +33,7 @@ other programs (such as <command>cat</command>, <command>cmp</command>,
<para>The Cygwin system gives us some flexibility in deciding how files
are to be opened when the mode is not specified explicitly.
The rules are evolving, this section gives the design goals.</para>
<orderedlist numeration="loweralpha">
<listitem>
<para>If the filename is specified as a POSIX path and it appears to
@ -41,22 +42,28 @@ with a directory displayed by <command>mount</command>), then the
default is specified by the mount flag. If the file is a symbolic link,
the mode of the target file system applies.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>If the file is specified via a MS-DOS pathname (i.e., it contains a
backslash or a colon), the default is binary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Pipes and non-file devices are opened in binary mode,
except if the <envar>CYGWIN</envar> environment variable contains
<literal>nobinmode</literal>. Sockets are always opened in binary
mode.</para>
<para>Pipes, sockets and non-file devices are opened in binary mode.
For pipes opened through the pipe() system call you can use the setmode()
function (see <xref linkend="textbin-devel"></xref> to switch to textmode.
For pipes opened through popen(), you can simply specify text or binary
mode just like in calls to fopen().</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para> When redirecting, the Cygwin shells uses rules (a-e). For
these shells the relevant value of <envar>CYGWIN</envar> is that at the time
the shell was launched and not that at the time the program is executed.
<para>Sockets and other non-file devices are always opened in binary mode.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para> When redirecting, the Cygwin shells uses rules (a-d).
Non-Cygwin shells always pipe and redirect with binary mode. With
non-Cygwin shells the commands <command> cat filename | program </command>
and <command> program &lt; filename </command> are not equivalent when
@ -94,9 +101,8 @@ REM Remove \r from the file given as argument
tr -d \r < %1 > %1.nocr
]]>
</screen>
<para> work fine. In the first case (assuming the pipes are binary)
we rely on <command>gunzip</command> to set its output to binary mode,
possibly overriding the mode used by the shell.
<para> work fine. In the first case we rely on <command>gunzip</command> to
set its output to binary mode, possibly overriding the mode used by the shell.
In the second case we rely on the DOS shell to redirect in binary mode.
</para>
</sect2>
@ -105,34 +111,28 @@ In the second case we rely on the DOS shell to redirect in binary mode.
<para>UNIX programs that have been written for maximum portability
will know the difference between text and binary files and act
appropriately under Cygwin. For those programs, the text mode default
is a good choice. Programs included in official Cygwin distributions
should work well in the default mode. </para>
appropriately under Cygwin. Most programs included in the official
Cygwin distributions should work well in the default mode. </para>
<para>Text mode makes it much easier to mix files between Cygwin and
Windows programs, since Windows programs will usually use the CRLF
format. Unfortunately you may still have some problems with text
mode. First, some of the utilities included with Cygwin do not yet
specify binary mode when they should.
Second, you will introduce CRs in text
files you write, which can cause problems when moving them back to a
UNIX system. </para>
<para>Binmode is the best choice usually since it's faster and
easier to handle, unless you want to exchange files with native Win32
applications. It makes most sense to keep the Cygwin distribution
and your Cygwin home directory in binmode and generate text files in
binmode (with UNIX LF lineendings). Most Windows applications can
handle binmode files just fine. A notable exception is the mini-editor
<command>Notepad</command>, which handles UNIX lineendings incorrectly
and only produces output files with DOS CRLF lineendings.</para>
<para>If you are mounting a remote file system from a UNIX machine,
or moving files back and forth to a UNIX machine, you may want to
access the files in binary mode. The text files found there will normally
be in UNIX NL format, and you would want any files put there by Cygwin
programs to be stored in a format understood by UNIX.
Be sure to remove CRs from all Makefiles and
shell scripts and make sure that you only edit the files with
DOS/Windows editors that can cope with and preserve NL terminated lines.
</para>
<para>You can convert files between CRLF and LF lineendings by using
certain tools in the Cygwin distribution like <command>d2u</command> and
<command>u2d</command> from the cygutils package. You can also specify
a directory in the mount table to be mounted in textmode so you can use
that directory for exchange purposes.</para>
<para>Note that you can decide this on a disk by disk basis (for
example, mounting local disks in text mode and network disks in binary
mode). You can also partition a disk, for example by mounting
<filename>c:</filename> in text mode, and <filename>c:\home</filename>
in binary mode.</para>
<para>As application programmer you can decide on a file by file base,
or you can specify default open modes depending on the purpose for which
the application open files. See the next section for a description of
your choices.</para>
</sect2>
@ -143,9 +143,10 @@ specified with the flag <literal>O_BINARY</literal> and text mode with
<literal>O_TEXT</literal>. These symbols are defined in
<filename>fcntl.h</filename>.</para>
<para>In the <function>fopen()</function> function call, binary mode can be
specified by adding a <literal>b</literal> to the mode string. Text mode is specified
by adding a <literal>t</literal> to the mode string.</para>
<para>In the <function>fopen()</function> and <function>popen()</function>
function calls, binary mode can be specified by adding a <literal>b</literal>
to the mode string. Text mode is specified by adding a <literal>t</literal>
to the mode string.</para>
<para>The mode of a file can be changed by the call
<function>setmode(fd,mode)</function> where <literal>fd</literal> is a file
@ -154,6 +155,55 @@ descriptor (an integer) and <literal>mode</literal> is
returns <literal>O_BINARY</literal> or <literal>O_TEXT</literal> depending
on the mode before the call, and <literal>EOF</literal> on error.</para>
<para>There's also a convenient way to set the default open modes used
in an application by just linking against various object files provided
by Cygwin. For instance, if you want to make sure that all files are
always opened in binary mode by an application, regardless of the mode
of the underlying mount point, just add the file
<filename>/lib/binmode.o</filename> to the link stage of the application
in your project, like this:</para>
<screen>
$ gcc my_tiny_app.c /lib/binmode.o -o my_tiny_app
</screen>
<para>This adds code which sets the default open mode for all files
opened by <command>my_tiny_app</command> to binary for reading and
writing.</para>
<para>Cygwin provides the following object files to set the default open mode
just by linking an application against them:</para>
<itemizedlist mark="bullet">
<listitem>
<screen>
/lib/automode.o - Open files for reading in textmode
Open files for writing in binary mode
</screen>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<screen>
/lib/binmode.o - Open files for reading and writing in binary mode
</screen>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<screen>
/lib/textmode.o - Open files for reading and writing in textmode
</screen>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<screen>
/lib/textreadmode.o - Open files for reading in textmode
Keep default behaviour for writing.
</screen>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</sect2>
</sect1>