BINARY or ASCII upload / download: What is the difference?

[Allen]

Hi all,

I'm on Windows, my server in Linux.

What does uploading / downloading in ASCII mode (as opposed to Binary) do except convert line endings? (\r\n to \n and vice-versa)

Allen

[Robber]

The line endings can make a big difference - my colleague was using the opposite to me which meant whenever I downloaded his files I got blank lines every other line - took a while to realise that was the problem though.

[nosanity]

Well, lets say that you had a .zip file on the server. If you downloaded the file in ascii, it would drop certain non-readable characters, rendering the file useless. I have found that 90% of the time, I like to force downloading binary to aviod the file being corrupted.

noSanity

[Allen]

So basically transferring text files in ASCII (eg. pages, scripts, csv's) does nothing except change the line endings.

Good.

I'm getting annoyed with writing files in Unix mode (on my Windows PC) so I can tell if the files have changed mroe easily, then having to reconvert files (to unix format) that I download from the linux server because the FTP program changes the line endings :/

Time to go and force binary mode :)

Allen