Not at all, you can pipe around all the binary you want. Until GNU tar added the 'z' option, the way to extract all files in a tarball was:
`gunzip -c < foo.tar.gz | tar x`
However, "text files" in Unix do have a very specific definition, if you want them to work with standard Unix text manipulation utilities like awk, sed, and diff:
All lines of text end are terminated by a line feed, even the last one.
I can't tell you how many "text files" I run across these days that don't have a trailing newline. It's as bad as mixing tabs and spaces, maybe worse.
No comments yet.
