The symptoms: If I run strfile on a file of quotes to generate a .dat file for the fortune program, I get strange behaviour from fortune for that quote file. I either get blank fortunes, or sometimes just the same quote again and again. I tried this with the latest stable release of Cygwin (1.5.10) but its been around for a long time.
I suspect that this is another example of an old problem with Unix programs ported to Windows. I mount my disks in text mode so that for text files (but not binary files) \n gets translated to DOS line-ends. This option tends to show up bugs in Unix programs where binary files are opened incorrectly in text mode. This is a common bug because on Unix there is no difference between text and binary modes.
So I tried adding a new mount point:
D:\cygwin\usr\share\fortune on /usr/share/fortune type system (binmode)
This makes just the fortune quote files' directory binary mode - i.e. no text file conversions.
Sure enough, strfile now creates .dat files that fortune likes.
Okay, having a special mount point is a bodge. It does however show that my suspicions are probably correct. I suspect that somewhere in strfile's source is an fopen with the mode "w" instead of "wb" when the .dat file is created. However, I don't know who's responsible for this program - so I thought I'd post my conclusions here. Is there anyone out there who knows how to get this fixed?
Andy
-- Andy Rushton, Southampton, UK
If all these sweet young things were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be a
bit surprised.
-- Dorothy Parker
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