Re: Display corruption with binary files

[Perry Smith]

On Nov 25, 2006, at 5:04 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

From: August Karlstrom <fusionfive@comhem.se>

Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2006 10:30:16 GMT

Bits of the binary file being interpreted at terminal control

characters is a likely culprit.

OK, but isn't a binary file as well as a text file really just a 

sequence of arbitrary bytes?

If that is the problem then Emacs should not send such characters to

the terminal.  It may be a terminal problem though.  I'd report it as

an Emacs bug with that caveat.

Eli Zaretskii's answer seems to indicate that this is a known problem.

Yes, it's a known problem that the Unix terminal interprets certain

sequences of characters as commands.  I'm not sure Emacs can do

anything to solve this, but suggestions are welcome.

I have not been closely watching this but I'm confused.

emacs of old (I thought) would 'quote' the characters.  So, if the file had a control-C, emacs would display ^C and a single forward-character while the cursor is sitting on the ^ would move two screeen spaces up to the next character.  So, while emacs would send escape sequences itself to control the terminal, the data of the file would be sent properly.  (I'm not sure I'm saying clearly what I mean.)

Is this not done?  Didn't emacs use to do it?

Perry Smith ( pedz@easesoftware.com )

Ease Software, Inc. ( http://www.easesoftware.com )

Low cost SATA Disk Systems for IBMs p5, pSeries, and RS/6000 AIX systems