What prgorams choke on 8 bit

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4 total messages Started by Dave Brower Tue, 08 Oct 1985 06:04

#45

Author: Dave Brower
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 1985 06:04

12 lines
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What UNIX programs are you aware of that have major problems with 8 bit
character sets?  One that comes quickly to mind is the Bourne shell,
which uses the 8th bit as a tag.  I suspect that vi/ex will also have
problems.  This would be a good forum to itemize the programs, the
problems and the solutions that can be used as work-arounds.

-dB

-- 
{amdahl|dual|sun|zehntel}\		|"If his brains ran down, how could
{ucbvax|decvax}!mtxinu---->!rtech!daveb |he talk?"
ihnp4!{phoenix|amdahl}___/		|"Happens to people all the time...."

Re: What prgorams choke on 8 bit

Author: Jim Moore
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1985 16:08

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1102 bytes

> What UNIX programs are you aware of that have major problems with 8 bit
> character sets?  One that comes quickly to mind is the Bourne shell,
> which uses the 8th bit as a tag....

In the case of path names, the UNIX kernel refuses to accept and 8 bit
character set. System Vr2 returns EFAULT if an attempt is made to 
create a file whose name contains a character with the high bit set.
4.2 BSD returns an EINVAL in the same case.

Jim Moore
MIPS Computer Systems
ucbvax!decwrl!mips!jmoore
ihnp4!decwrl!mips!jmoore

Re: What prgorams choke on 8 bit

#11

Author: Roy Smith
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1985 22:23

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> What UNIX programs are you aware of that have major problems with 8 bit
> character sets?

	I'm pretty sure emacs (pick a version) expects that it will be able
to use the 8th bit to represent meta-characters.  Actually, emacs uses a
9-bit character set (so you can have such things as Control-Meta-Return).
I have no idea what all the ramifications of this will be, but I suspect it
might get messy.

	I can see it now -- Joe Emacshacker swoops down on an unsuspecting
luser and floors him with "Hey, there's a better way to do that.  You can
save 2 keystrokes by just doing Control-Top-Meta-Danish_O_Umlaut!" :-)
-- 
Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy>
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Re: What prgorams choke on 8 bit

#15

Author: Daniel R. Levy
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1985 02:57

31 lines
1917 bytes

In article <204@mips.UUCP>, jmoore@mips.UUCP (Jim Moore) writes:
>> What UNIX programs are you aware of that have major problems with 8 bit
>> character sets?  One that comes quickly to mind is the Bourne shell,
>> which uses the 8th bit as a tag....
>
>In the case of path names, the UNIX kernel refuses to accept and 8 bit
>character set. System Vr2 returns EFAULT if an attempt is made to
>create a file whose name contains a character with the high bit set.
>4.2 BSD returns an EINVAL in the same case.
>
>Jim Moore
>MIPS Computer Systems

Huh?  On our System Vr2 3B20 I just created such a file name, viz:

$ ls

$ od -c .
0000000   4 020   .  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000020  \0   !   .   .  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000040   4 021 377  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000060
                 ^
                 |
-- 
 -------------------------------    Disclaimer:  The views contained herein are
|       dan levy | yvel nad      |  my own and are not at all those of my em-
|         an engihacker @        |  ployer or the administrator of any computer
| at&t computer systems division |  upon which I may hack.
|        skokie, illinois        |
 --------------------------------   Path: ..!ihnp4!ttrdc!levy

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