[Info-vax] Unable to install freeware

[Dirk Munk]

lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 12:50:27 PM UTC+12, Richard Levitte wrote:
>
>> You *could* try this and see how it makes a difference afterwards:
>>
>> $ set file/attrib=(rfm:stmlf,rat:cr) vtfm.com
>
> Wonder why VMS fought kicking and screaming against bringing in the idea of stream-formatted files, and still wants to insist that everything be formatted as a record...
>

I don't understand what you mean.

In *these* kind of files the records are separated by a <cr> or a <lf> 
or both the <cr><lf> terminators. That is the way Unix and Windows 
separate records from each other.

With VMS you can have a fixed record size. In that case there is 
actually nothing to separate the records. There is a field in the file 
header that contains record size. If you modify that field, the record 
size will change.

There are several types of variable record sizes. But in general there 
will be a field in front of every record that will tell you the size of 
the record. Again there are no terminators, so the data in the record 
can contain any character, contrary to unix/windows type of stream files 
where the data can not contain a terminator character.

And of course VMS also has files with completely undefined data streams, 
your application has to know how to read these files.