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

[timill]

ASCII/binary download problem, perhaps?

Re: Computers are weird.

[eagle]

At a guess, you have an ftp client that doesn't automatically set type binary but the BBEdit ftp client does. FTP, being an ancient protocol, defaults to doing text conversion (CRLF to LF, that sort of thing), which is basically never what you want any more, but which was horribly useful when transferring data from record-based systems to byte-stream systems and between systems with different line-ending conventions. If you leave the text-conversion thing on with any file format more complicated than text, though, it corrupts the file.

[brooksmoses]

To add to the other bits of explanation, the thing to do in your terminal-window ftp session is, before entering the "get" command to get the file, enter the "binary" command to set it to the correct mode to avoid the text-conversion foo.

the other thing...

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

about command line ftp clients is that if you type 'ftp', you get ftp, some ur-saurian thing from the swamps of the Permian that will do the job but sneers at these fancy modern conveniences like internal metabolic regulation and non-heterodont dentition.

If you type 'lftp' or something like that, you get a modern command line ftp client. I have no idea which ones, if any, ship with OS X.

Though Safari should cope just about perfectly with ftp:// format URIs; Konqueror, its linux cousin, certainly does.