Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3434 mails)

[Anders Johansson <ajh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 18 February 2008 00:06:22 Carlos E. R. wrote:
> One of the differences between text and binary files is that text
> files can contain control characters: new line, tabs... and an end of file
> marker.

Nope. There is no difference (to the OS) between binary files and text files. 
They are just a sequence of characters

> Yes, it is a character; not printable, not displayable, but a 
> character all right. It is up to the application program to use it or not,
> and even to recognize it as EOF or something else.

You are wrong. EOF is defined by POSIX as something which cannot be physically 
read from or written to disk

Haven't you ever wondered why getc() returns an integer when it just reads a 
char? It's because the "control character" EOF is an integer, and as such can 
never ever be read from a file as a character

But I'll give you a chance to prove me wrong: give me something to write to a 
file that will cause an end-of-file even when there is more data after it

I'll save you some time and say that there is no such thing, but if you want 
to spend time looking for it, feel free

Anders

-- 
Madness takes its toll
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