Computers are weird.

[kiya]

teriel called me to ask if I had access to an ftp program; I said sure, I'm running a *nix (it's rare that the backend of OSX is that blatantly useful, but hey). Gave me info about the file I needed.

Ran ftp from terminal, got the file. File message included "File may not have transferred correctly." Well, okay. We'll see. Attempted to open file, Word said, "Are you sure that's a Word file? Open it from the Open menu to be sure?" I tried that, I tried from Finder.

I redownloaded the file. "File may not have transferred correctly."

Sigh. I email to notify of the problem.

I tried opening it in Appleworks, in the principle of what the hell. It crashed Appleworks so hard I could hear the pixels burning.

Um.

I tried opening it in BBEdit, a text-only processor.

It opened in BBEdit with lots of Word crap, but there was text there, at least.

I said hmm.

I FTP-downloaded it again in BBEdit, just to try at getting a clean copy. I saved it, in the hope that not modifying anything would leave the Word crap interpretable by Word.

It appears to now open in Word, complete with fonts and formatting.

Computers are fucking weird.

Comments

[ckd]

It's not so much a question of "out of date" as of the defaults, which might apply to the server as well. The command-line ftp client isn't going to do much for you automatically since that's not its role.