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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 306 responses total. |
rcurl
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response 195 of 306:
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May 28 02:40 UTC 1998 |
The MIME encoding and decoding is automatic in pine. Did you specify a
*binary* download? Do you have the same application (and same or newer
version) that wrote the file they sent?
This can be a very frustrating exercise. I am trying to help someone send
a file to me so that I can open it, but they haven't yet told me what the
application and communications programs are. They may be using a different
protocol for the attachment, or encoding it in some fashion they haven't
told you, etc. You have to know *exactly* what they did before you can
solve these file transfer problems (except by hit or miss or by good
luck).
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other
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response 196 of 306:
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May 28 03:11 UTC 1998 |
re 194: yes. i apparently had someone try to login to my account while i
was logged in a couple days ago...
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keesan
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response 197 of 306:
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May 29 14:54 UTC 1998 |
Re 195, they never even exactly told me what coding program they used the
first time. The second time they told me that they could also send it in Mime
format or hex something or other as well as uuencode (which led me to believe
they used uuencode the first time and mime the second). I typed set file
type binary when using Kermit to download. What looks like all letters in
grex looks like upper ASCII in WP5.1. I sent them WP5.1, it got edited at
their end, they did not tell me if it remained in WP5.1, though I asked
twice about this. I will write again and ask for specific answers. I would
hope the communications programs do not have to match. I doubt that the
person who sent me the files knows what was done to them first. We will
experiment by sending a WP5.1 binary file from one of us to the other.
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keesan
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response 198 of 306:
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May 29 15:10 UTC 1998 |
This time my screen froze up at the very end of a line, on about my fourth
(possibly fifth) response in Agora, end of the third line. I had also
read two e-mail messages and responded to one first. I was letting line
wrap work in the response. From now on I may do hard returns and see if
that helps any. I cannot get back to grex while still connected on the
phone by typing enter or Ctl-L. (It worked once, for some reason, but
usually does not).
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rcurl
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response 199 of 306:
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May 29 15:45 UTC 1998 |
If the file you received is all letters, it is MIME or uuencode or binhex
(others?). Pine decodes MIME automatically (it is "MIME compliant" - the
free e-mail service "juno" is not, by the way - you can't send someone on
juno an attachment from pine and have it decoded for them). You can tell
if it is uuencoded by the first lines of the file, which reads like "begin
644 newname".
You uuencode a file with the command
uuencode newname <file> uuname.uu
newname is the name the file will have when it is decoded, file is the
file to be encoded (the brackets must be written in the command),
uuname.uu is the name to give the uuencoded file (it is convention to add
the .uu to identify the file type).
You decode it with
uudecode uuname.uu
and the file newname will be created with the contents of the original
file.
(The instructions in man uuencode are not correct.)
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keesan
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response 200 of 306:
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May 29 16:02 UTC 1998 |
I just printed out your instructions and will try them on the first three
files that were sent to me. Thanks. I always assume it is me rather than
the instructions which have the problem.
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keesan
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response 201 of 306:
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May 29 16:13 UTC 1998 |
Rane, I am afraid I did not understand your instructions. The file sent to
me, and saved from my e-mail attachment to my home directory, is called (by
the sender, and I did not change the name) Ge9495a.cec.
I tried uudecode Ge9495a.cec and got 'No 'end' line.
I tried uudecode Ge9495a.uu, Ge9495a.cec.uu, and uuGe9495a.cec and got
no such file or directory. Do I need more info from the sender, or am
I just completely off track in following your instructions?
Hopefully this file is accessible to you as well, do you want to give it
a try decoding it? Or let me know what to do to make it accessible?
I also saved what I am hoping are mimed files, one of which is mimea (the same
file), and it did not automatically decode (I checked in WP5.1).
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mcnally
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response 202 of 306:
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May 29 16:23 UTC 1998 |
BTW, MIME is really just a scheme for telling your mailer what kinds of
documents are attached and where they begin and end -- there's isn't a
specific "MIME" representation scheme for turning binary files into text
for transmission.. MIME-compliant mailers typically use uuencode, base64,
or (less commonly) binhex to do that..
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keesan
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response 203 of 306:
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May 29 16:31 UTC 1998 |
The uuencode file started with Begin 600 filename.
The mimed file, when downloaded, was readable in DOS but not in WP5.1, where
it shows up as upper level ASCII. Jim will see if he can remove some of the
stuff at the beginning to make it readable. I will e-mail the sender and
ask if they sent WP5.1 or perhaps Word for Windows instead.
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rcurl
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response 204 of 306:
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May 29 17:06 UTC 1998 |
I downloaded Ge9495a.cec to my machine, uudecoded it there, and it opens
as a WORD document. It is quite readable. I don't know why it did not
decode on grex. Maybe their uudecode is obsolete? Would you like me to
e-mail it to you as plain text?
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keesan
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response 205 of 306:
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May 29 18:05 UTC 1998 |
Rane, I cannot read WORD text. They just assured me that it was sent as
WP5.1, and that they have to encode by one of three systems when sending an
attachment, or else add it to the body of the text. Jim says their file
starts with WPCG, and my WP5.1 files start with WPC7. I will write again and
ask if they might possibly have sent me a WORD file by error.
I still don't know how to use uudecode. COuld you possibly take the time to
see if you can get uudecode working on grex, and if it is obsolete maybe
someone could upgrade it?
Jim tried to convert the demimed file from Word 4.0 to WP5.1 and this did not
work. What version of Word did you get?
Thanks again.
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remmers
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response 206 of 306:
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May 29 18:33 UTC 1998 |
As far as I know, the uuencode and uudecode commands on Grex are
working. According to the man page, Grex's uuencode even claims
to support base64 encoding.
Re #202 (technical aside): uuencode isn't part of the MIME standard,
so a MIME-compliant mail user agent isn't required to support it
(although some do, I'm sure).
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keesan
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response 207 of 306:
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May 29 20:01 UTC 1998 |
The person who sent me the files claims they are in WP5.1, that this is the
only wordprocessor that particular editor owns, and that she just opened them
in WP5.1 to check. Rane, did you also try to read the file in WP5.1? Is it
possible that by opening it in WORD, WORD automatically converted from
WP5.1? Does anyone who has WP5.1 want to try reading my (hopefully decoded)
file mimea, which reads okay in DOS but is gibberish when I look at it in
WP5.1 after donwloading it as a binary file?
If Jim ever recovers enough from his viral infection to wake up, we can try
sending the original WP5.1 file to his account, then e-mailing it from there
to my account, and downloading to see what it looks like after that.
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keesan
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response 208 of 306:
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May 30 00:17 UTC 1998 |
Progress
1. We uploaded a WP5.1 file to my home directory, then e-mailed it to Jim's
account using Pine (automatically encoded as MIME?), then Viewed and Saved
it to his home directory, then downloaded (upload and download with Kermit,
set file type binary) it to the computer here, and it came out the same as
the files someone sent me (mimea is one of them, in my home directory). In
DOS it was readable, in WP51. is was lower and extended ASCII characters
(8-bit). It does not seem that saving from an attachment to the home
directory with V and S automatically converts a file from its MIME coded
format. Can someone explain how to decode MIME using grex (and please try
it out on my mimea file to be sure it works, or I can send you a WP51 file
to your account, encoded using PINE, and you can try to find some way to
decode it on grex.)
2. We then used the WP5.1 convert program to convert to 7-bit transfer
format, did the same upload, mail, download with it, used the convert program
to convert back from 7-bit format to WP5.1, and it worked perfectly. So I
can ask people to send me 7-bit transfer format, but it is 50% longer than
the original file (maybe all coded files are that much longer) and therefore
takes a lot omore of grex's time to download.
3. I would still like to know if there is some way to decode uuencode using
grex, and please make sure it works on file Ge9495a.cec, which I am told was
sent to me uuencoded. What is a missing 'end' line?
I hope it is appropriate to be asking these questions in this item, but there
is a chance that it is a system problem. Probably nobody else has ever tried
to send binary files via grex, before we joined it was a 7-bit system, and
a week after we asked Valerie how to send 8-bit files it became an 8-bit
system, for which we are very grateful (and for which reason we joined).
I will gladly donate $25 to grex (general purpose operating expenses) in honor
of Valerie, Scott, Rane and other highly helpful grexers if someone can teach
me how to decode uuencode, and another $25 for decoding mime, using only the
resources available in grex. (Valerie responded to our request for some way
to send binary files, Scott came over and pointed out that we needed hardware
flow control to use anything but Kermit, and Rane has been attempting to fix
my decoding problems.) It would be much appreciated ASAP, who knows when I
will really need the ability to decode such stuff. (Thanks also to Omni for
his extended memory card and Kent for steering us to shroom software, it can
be in their honor as well.)
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davel
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response 209 of 306:
|
May 30 00:50 UTC 1998 |
One obscure-but-possibly-related point: to do a binary transfer, kermit needs
*both* ends configured as binary. You're doing "set file type binary" (on
Grex I presume), but is your other end (Procomm?) configured for kermit to
do binary file transfers?
The "end" line is what tells uudecode that you've reached the end of the
(encoded) file. Let me go off & create & uuencode a (small) file as an
example:
$ echo this is a test > asdf
$ uuencode asdf < asdf > asdf1
$ cat asdf1
begin 644 asdf
/=&AI<R!I<R!A('1E<W0*
`
end
The "begin" line says that when the file is uudecoded it's to produce a file
named "asdf" with 644 (rw-r--r--) permissions. The following lines (in this
case, 2 of them) up to but not including the "end" line are the encoded date.
The end tells uudecode that this is the end of the file. You can run
uudecode on a file containing stuff before and after any of them, and
it will use on the begin & end lines to determine where the uuencoded
part begins & ends.
So look at your (saved) message. Does it include a line with "begin"
at the very beginning of the line, having the structure of my example's
"begin" line, followed by even-length lines of (apparent) garbage?
Look at the end of it for a line consisting of "end" at the beginning
of the line.
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keesan
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response 210 of 306:
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May 30 02:46 UTC 1998 |
Jim looked at the uuencode file and instead of 600 the first line read
begin 600 filename
and the last line read
end
(all by itself).
Is the 600 something that grex's uudecode program cannot deal with? And why
does it tell us No 'end' line? The file is 60 characters long.
Why was Rane able to uudecode it on his system, but it does not seem to work
on grex? Davel, could you look at thefile in question, Ge9496a.cec I think
it was, in my home directory, and see if you can decode it while on grex?
And if you can, what should I type in other than uudecode filename? Rane said
something about grex's uuencode manual instructions being wrong, someone (I
am losing track) said they were right, but could someone simply try following
the instructions to see if they work, then explain them for an idiot?
The other problem remains what to do with the automatically mimed file (it
is called mimea in my home directory, they sent it in a different coded
format).
Thanks to everyone for your time, and apologies for my ignorance, but I always
seem to need to learn things in a hurry and don't have time to read up on it.
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scg
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response 211 of 306:
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May 30 03:33 UTC 1998 |
600 is the file permissions. That means that the owner of the file (you) can
read and write to it, but that nobody else can access it. Having a number
there is part of the UUencode format.
I believe the end at the end is what's supposed to be there.
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rcurl
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response 212 of 306:
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May 30 05:50 UTC 1998 |
My WORD (Mac) 6.0 reads WP5 files. Anyway - do you want this file e-mailed
to you as text - perfectly readable - or don't you? I don't know why
uudecode on grex doesn't work. I used UUTool (Mac) on my machine. The
man page for uuencode shows commands that don't work on grex: something
is out of wack.
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valerie
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response 213 of 306:
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May 30 20:06 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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davel
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response 214 of 306:
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May 30 20:18 UTC 1998 |
OK, I think I see what your problem is. This file came from a DOS source,
and has extra carriage-return characters at the ends of all the lines.
That's why uudecode isn't recognizing the "end" line - it's "end^M"
not just "end".
You're also going to have a problem trying to uudecode it, since the name of
your file and the name to be given the uudecoded file (from the "begin" line)
are the same. It will overwrite before it's done reading, I think, leaving
you with a partial file. The simplest way to avoid this is to rename
the original before uudecoding.
Here are instructions for dealing with this, geared to this particular file.
(There's a program, flip, intended for stripping out or adding carriage
returns, but it doesn't seem to have survived the transition to the new
system. Thus the sed & pipe in what follows.)
At a shell prompt:
mv -i Ge9495a.cec Ge9495a.dos
sed 's/^V^M$//' Ge9495a.dos | uudecode
(The "^V^M" means to press control-V followed by control-M. This should
actually echo as "^M".)
This will create the file Ge9495a.cec, which should be what you want. You
can then do a file transfer (binary) on that.
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davel
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response 215 of 306:
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May 30 20:23 UTC 1998 |
Valerie slipped in. No, redirecting the output won't help;
it's going to use the filename from the "begin" line (unless
there's some kind of option to let you specify a different name).
And redirecting input doesn't matter. And the missing "end" is
definitely the carriage-returns at the ends of the lines.
I've tested this to make sure it all works, if you follow my
instructions.
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rcurl
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response 216 of 306:
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May 31 03:52 UTC 1998 |
UUTool on my computer is apparently not bothered by extra ^M, since it
decoded the file just fine. There must be an equivalent free utility
for a PC.
It is even easier to use the command Valerie gave, but chose a different
destination file name.
I did experiment with uuencode and uudecode here on a file in my
directory, and they worked fine. So the problem is that grex's version
is flummoxed by carriage returns.
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mcnally
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response 217 of 306:
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May 31 04:52 UTC 1998 |
Or, alternatively, that something else is sticking carriage returns
in where they don't belong..
Usually you get those pesky extra carriage returns when someone uses
a binary transfer mode to move a text file (ever wonder *why* most
transfer protocols have a binary mode and a text mode? it's to take
care of things like those CR/LF problems..)
If you expected to be doing a lot of uudecoding of such files you
could just alias your uudecode command so it would do sed with the
right arguments piped to uudecode..
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keesan
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response 218 of 306:
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May 31 18:32 UTC 1998 |
Thanks to everyone, I have not tried any of this yet because I am waiting for
Jim to wake up. We both still have some sort of virus and Jim's response is
to sleep a lot. Rane, thanks, I don't need this particular file as much as
I need to know how to receive WP5.1 files via e-mail and decode them, so I
will try to produce it on my own, but many thanks for proving that the file
was in fact decodable with uudecode.
re #211, if 600 means nobody else can access my file, how did Rane manage to
decode it?
re #213, we are trying one other solution to the problem of freezing up the
screen (it happens all over the place, not just in MAIL, and even when I do
hard returns every line, and may be worse in warmer weather). We replaced
an internal modem, which may be overheating, with an external one, and so far
so good. I have had no such problems except while online to grex.
After we get uudecode working, it would also be nice to be able to read the
MIMEd files, which could conceivably also have a hard return problem.
Hopefully with all these hints Jim can figure out that part.
I don't understand 'alias' or 'piped', perhaps Jim knows their meaning.
If any of you superhelpful people ever need any help reading a Slavic
language, please call me first.
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keesan
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response 219 of 306:
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May 31 19:24 UTC 1998 |
The freeze-up problem may have been the modem, as it did not happen in 40 min
or so with the external modem. But then I got disconnected, which I am
guessing had to do with grex being overloaded. I got disconnected a second
time in 2 minutes, so now have a 2400 bps modem hooked up, Jim was convinced
the disconnect was due to the other 14.4 modem.
Instead of the mv command, I could, I think, simply rename the file
to be uudecoded while saving it to my home directory. We will now try to
figure out what sed means, before applying this command.
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