RFC 448 (rfc448) - Page 3 of 3
Print files in FTP
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 448 PRINT FILES IN FTP February 1973 VFC Case | FORMat | STRUcture ------------------------------------------------------------------- N | Unformatted | Record structure | - | - T | Unformatted | File structure | - | - A | Print File | Record structure | - | - Thus, the authors of RJE intended to use the _structure_ attribute to resolve Cases N and T. This is perhaps a reasonable choice, but we should understand the consequences and make them explicit within the FTP document. Assume for the moment that we want to maintain perfect consistency between FTP and RJE. An FTP server which uses ASA VFC internally should convert _every_ (Unformatted, Unstructured) file it receives to an internal print file! That is, the file must be mapped into a set of physical lines (which are really logical records internally), and an ASA VFC character must be appended to the beginning of each line before it is stored. Note that this implies that the default file structure in FTP should be changed to _record_structure_. (This reinforces the point made by Wayne Hathaway in RFC 414 that if a Tenex user transmits a source file to an IBM host and expects to manipulate it in some useful way, he'd better send it with _record_ structure.) ANOTHER CHOICE -------------- If the loss of (unformatted, unstructured) as a simple default case is too offensive, we can simply change FTP to include three formats corresponding to Cases N, A, and T. RJE would be changed correspondingly. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --------------- Discussions with Steve Wolfe, Jon Postel, and Eric Harslem were very helpful in clarifying the print file problem in FTP. RTB/gjm [ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by Alex McKenzie with ] [ support from GTE, formerly BBN Corp. 9/99 ] Braden
