On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Glenn McCorkle wrote: > Linux Netscape just now did the same D**m thing. > > --a--- 1,021,462 11-29-02 7:04p c:\1recv\linux_ns\ara171ue.exe > (ns saved it with .exe extension and did not suggest .exe.gz or .gz)
No, you asked it for a file, and it gets that file for you...Simple, nothing complicated... > The content-type being sent from Angelfire is "application/msdownload" > > I don't know wheather it's my client that's doing it or perhaps > the Angelfire server does it when it detects a Linux or Linux_style > client that's doing the D/L. > (Dos_Lynx is after-all a Dos port of the Linux browser) > > But whichever the case may be... what we end-up-with is a Gzipped .EXE > which must then be Gunzipped and renamed. :(((( Nothing to do with Linux at all. Exactly correct behaviour, just one way that things ought to be. Glenn, how do you think that some software knows that it is a gzipped file and then decides (all by itself) to gunzip it? At the beginning of most files there is a (magic) marker that indicates the file content. I am not sure what it is for a gzipped file, but I know that WordPerfect files have WPC as characters 2,3,4 of the first four file characters. Looking at some files here, PKZipped files seem to have PK has the first 2 characters. So software has 2 ways of deciding what a file is, and what to do with it. One depends on what is in the beginning of the file, the other depends on the file extension. Actually there is also the label that the server will put on the file. I don't know how that works, but it doesn't seem to be very consistent. So, just because some software automatically gunzips a file, it does not have to be that all software does so. Both Arachne and Internet Explorer do this. Netscape/Mozilla do not. Lynx does not, unless you ask it to. wget does, I guess on the assumption that you know what you are doing because you ask for the executable file. Just make life easy. If you want people to download a DOS executable, make it a DOS executable. Simple! Don't put a gzipped file labelled as a DOS executable. Then all clients will be happy. Regards -- Gregor J Jones mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston MA
