User's Guide for MS-DOS Clients

304

Connecting to a LAN Manager for UNIX Systems Server

Handling Incompatible File Formats

Different operating systems store ﬁles in different formats. For this reason,

even if you can link to a shared directory that contains a ﬁle you want to use,

you may not be able to open the ﬁle; or if you are able to open the ﬁle, it may

be inappropriately formatted for your environment.

For example, suppose the following ﬁle was created with a UNIX system

text editor:

Dear Bob:

This letter is in response to your inquiry of February 25.

The information you requested is enclosed, along with other

materials that should help you evaluate our product line.

If you look at this ﬁle with the MS-DOS type command, you would see the

following:

Dear Bob:

This letter is in response to your inquiry of February 25.

he information you requested is enclosed, along with other

materials that should help you to evaluate our product line.

Similarly, if you had created the original ﬁle using an MS-DOS editor and

listed it with the UNIX system cat -v command, you would see the

following:

Dear Bob:^M

This letter is in response to your inquiry of February 25.^M

The information you requested is enclosed, along with other^M

materials that should help you evaluate our product line.^M

This is because, in the UNIX system, each line of text ends with a line-feed

character. In the MS-DOS system, however, each line of text ends with a

carriage-return character, followed by a line-feed character.

If you need to convert text ﬁles from one operating system format to another,

LAN Manager provides a conversion utility, the ud (UNIX to MS-DOS)

command, which is described in the next section. The ud command can be

used to translate a text ﬁle from MS-DOS format to the UNIX system

format, or vice versa.