samba - Jan 2000 - CRLF/LF Conversion

Hi everybody!

I hope that you are not already "pissed off" of all the crlf/lf
conversion
discussion between dos and unix ;-)


Concerning that topic I have a question / suggestion:

This is what we have:
   We are using a Win NT 4.0 Server with Win95 clients. Additionally we have a
   Sun (Solaris 2.5) running in the same network. To access the Sun in character
   mode we use a terminal emulation (Reflection). We do not access the Sun from
   the clients in GUI mode.

This is what we do:
   We are supporting a software with a huge amount of single files (more than
   7000 (7K) files!) running/laying on the UNIX machine. When we receive a patch
   we have to have to compare the patched file with the one on our Sun and then
   add the patched lines into it. Therefore we ftp the files to the Win clients
   and then use a windows tool (vdifmrg) to compare and patch the files. This
   tool creates a new file with the merged output. After all this we ftp those
   files back to the Sun.

   We thought that when using Samba we get rid of the "ftp steps" and
simply
   access those files directly on the Unix machine. This works except of the
   generation of the output file because this is saved in DOS-format on the Unix
   file system. So we would have to convert those generated files manually to
   make them work. If we have to do this we prefer to use the former way.

This is what we would like to have:
   Well, it is very simple to guess what we want to have: a CRLF/LF conversion
   ;-) and I know of all your thoughts and concerns about this. Because I read a
   lot of articles from the Samba web site especially the
   CRLF-LF-Conversions.txt file.
   But for us, it would be great to have a PERMANENT file conversion because we
   only "access" ASCII files. If we have to transfer binaries we will
use the
   good old ftp protocol.


What do you think about this? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for us?
Is it possible to implement this conversion into Samba or does anybody has
another, perhaps better, solution for us?


Best regards,

   Stefan Kappey
   TRW ISCS GmbH
   GERMANY

On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 21:38:48 +1100, hai scritto:
>What do you think about this? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for
us?
>Is it possible to implement this conversion into Samba or does anybody has
>another, perhaps better, solution for us?
There are windows editors (I use TextPad) which can save in dos/unix/mac
formats, and default to save files in the format they already are.
See if your win prog (or newer versions of it) can do the same.

Otherwise you can do a script that periodically checks the files and if
they are in dos format converts them to unix. This would be a 2 steps
solution.

-- 
giulioo@pobox.com

On  0, stefan_kappey@trw-iscs.com wrote:
> Hi everybody!
> 
> I hope that you are not already "pissed off" of all the crlf/lf
conversion
> discussion between dos and unix ;-)
> 
> < SNIP > 
> 
> What do you think about this? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for
us?
> Is it possible to implement this conversion into Samba or does anybody has
> another, perhaps better, solution for us?
> 
Samba does not touch the contents of the files, which is good. Handling text
files
and html files is something, that we as users should take care about. One
solution that
was suggested to me was use freeware or shareware products on Microsoft
platform.
I downloaded GWD Text editor and use it in the place of Notepad. It converts
text
files from different platforms appropriately. You can choose wordpad, but IMHO
it is
a bit heavier than GWD. GWD is lightweight and does the job well.

There is another circumlocuted way of converting the files, using programs like
dos2unix
and unix2dos. That is not worth it. You are better off using some good text
editors on
Microsoft platforms.

Hope that helps.

Subba Rao
subb3@attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/truemax/

 => Time is relative. Here is a new way to look at time.
<http://www.smcinnovations.com

Stefan Kappey wrote:
| We are supporting a software with a huge amount of single files 
| (more than 7000 (7K) files!) running/laying on the UNIX machine. 
| When we receive a patch we have to have to compare the patched 
| file with the one on our Sun and then add the patched lines into 
| it. Therefore we ftp the files to the Win clients and then use 
| a windows tool (vdifmrg) to compare and patch the files. This
| tool creates a new file with the merged output. After all this 
| we ftp those files back to the Sun.

	Well, ther'es at least two ways to do this:
	1) vdiffmrg on the Sun (the filemerge tool 
		does just that)
	2) change the whole share via the vfs written
		by Tim Potter (Tim.Potter@anu.edu.au)

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | and astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | //www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/author.html
Work: (905) 415-2849 Home: (416) 223-8968 Email: davecb@canada.sun.com