User:Tingo/Tips

Various tips that I have found useful.

Text files

Removing parity bit from text files

If you have transferred text / ascii files from a machine running SINTRAN III to some other machine, you might find that the files reads garbled. The reason for that is that SINTRAN III requires files to be in ascii 7-bit format, with even parity. Thus, the highest (most significant) bit might be set on many characters to achieve even parity. If you want to read those files as text files, you can convert them. It is easy, simply strip the most significant bit on all characters. Note: this will render the file unusable for SINTRAN III. Always keep a copy of the original file if you need to use it under SINTRAN III again. For any unix-like system, you can use the 'tr' command, like this:

tr "[\201-\377]" "[\1-\177]" < PREP.SYMB > prep.symb.txt

The file PREP.SYMB is read, and the acsii file is written as prep.symb.txt. Note: it is also possible to instruct transfer programs like 'kermit' to translate the file when it is transferred.