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Re: (no subject)



On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 03:30:52PM +0530, Pallav Nawani typed:
> On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Rajeev Jha wrote:
> > that brings us to the next question, what is a binary file ? like i have
> > 

> A binary file is a sequence of instructions to the microprocessor
> (Hereafter abbreviated mpu). A program has two components:
>

A binary file need not always contain code. What you're describing is an 
"executable" - i.e a file that contains executable code. I suppose the
confusion occurs because of the term "binaries" used to specify programs
distributed in the executable format (as opposed to "source" form).

The distinction between "text" files and "binary" files is mostly semantics.
The general description being what Sachin mentioned - A text file is a file
containing printable ASCII characters only (and may be a few format control 
codes like CR, LF, Tab etc)..

Any file that is not a text file is termed as a binary file. This could be
code, data, or anything that contains non-printable ASCII information.

The distinction is pretty vague. Under MSDOS, files containing characters
above the ASCII code 128 (the IBM PC extended line-drawing character set)
were often classified under "text" files because you could view its contents
with a lot of DOS text editors (And even print it on a lot of printers)..

Kala