Re: dmp files

Tommy wrote:

> A DBA created some .dmp files for me to transfer, when i did i noticed the
> files had changed the content, is there a special way to transfer these
> files?
> I gzipped the files and transferred them again, and then everything looked
> fine.

Assuming you mean by transfer, you used FTP?

FTP has two transfer modes. ASCII and BINARY. Bad idea to perform an ASCII transfer on binary dump file. The file will arrive u/s on the other side, with an incorrect file size.

Windows FTP default is ASCII.

Unix FTP default is BINARY.

FTP tools often guess as to whether to use one or the other. Many of them also use ASCII as the default.

A clever tool will see that a gzipped file has a .Z or .ZIP extention and know that this is a binary file. Thus it will use a BINARY transfer and not an ASCII one. The same tool may just treat a .DMP file as ASCII and transfer it as ASCII.

Using GUI's for something like FTP... GUI's should make things easier. However, many developers have their GUI's thinking too on behalf of the user. Which IMO is a Bad Thing (tm). GUI's have the habit of turning naive users in to dumb users.

--
Billy