CIFS (Samba) and DOS CR/LF Characters

[David Snider]

We have just implemented SAMBA on our HP-UX 11.0 64-bit server at the request of some of our DBA's. The problem we are running into is that copying text files to and from the server from Windows machines doesn't take care of the CR/LF characters as ftp in ascii mode does.. One of the DBA's insists that an old employer had automatic translation of files from Unix to DOS format working with SAMBA.. I can't find any information on how to do this. Does anyone know of a solution? I have them all using a unix2dos executeable currently.. But only as a temporary solution hopefully..

[John Poff]

Hello,

As far as I know Samba has never done any CR/LF conversions. It's just too hard to figure out the right thing to do. Probably your DBA worked in a shop where they hacked up a trick similar to yours.

JP

[Bill Hassell]

This is the problem when you share unrelated filesystems. ASCII in DOS/Windows is different than Unix and there can be no simple conversion solution. The reason is easy:

How do you determine that a file is ASCII? In DOS/Windows, the convention is something.txt but there is nothing to enforce that rule. In Unix, any file name can contain anything. SO there is nothing in SAMBA/CIFS that could ever be configured to do such a conversion.

And most important: this is the 'real' disk so if you export a filesystem from HP-UX to a PC, when would the conversion be done? Reads and writes for both Unix and the PC think they are talking to the real disk...so 50% of the possible users will probably have the wrong version.

The only solution is to share these files n dual directories. Export a set of ASCII files to a PC by copying them with a script that uses ux2dos...and the PC looks at the copies. When the files need to be returned, use another script that copies them back from the share using dos2ux.

BTW: ftp handles this conversion automatically when using the ASCII option. And even better, ftp handles mainframes and Macs and just about any operating system that supports TCP/IP.

[Fabien DISSON]

Hello,

When I installed samba on my HP11.0 servers,
I read somewhere in the documentation that
samba doesn't do any CR/LF translation,
in any configuration option.
The reason was already explained if preceding replies.

Regards.