3 new (?) words

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Sun, 31 Mar 2002  4:28:16 PM Eastern Standard Time, Elaine -HFB- Ashton <elaine at CHAOS.WUSTL.EDU> writes:

> James A. Landau [JJJRLandau at AOL.COM] quoth:
> *>
> *>I had never before seen "DOS" (meaning MS-DOS) used as a verb, but on a
> *>technical mailing list this week I saw "your file had been dossed."  What
> *>happens is that MS-DOS (and WINDOWS) use a different convention for ending
> *>each record of a file than do the various flavors of UNIX.  Actually I think
>
> Actually, it's the ending for each line; DOS uses CRLF [ carriage return
> line feed ], Unix uses LF [ line feed ] and MacOS uses CR [ carriage
> return ].
>
> Most Unix OS have 'dos2unix' and 'unix2dos' commands to do the conversion.
>
> *>the writer misused the term, as it implies that the file was CONVERTED to DOS
> *>format, and apparently he meant to say that the file had been CREATED in DOS
> *>format and never converted to UNIX format.
>
> I don't think it's in use among technical professionals since DOS
> also means "Denial of Service" which is a form of hacking. From the Jargon
> File:
>
> "DoS attack //
>
> [Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to `DOS' as name of an operating
> system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack. This abbreviation is
> most often used of attempts to shut down newsgroups with floods of spam,
> or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, or to flood
> network links with large amounts of traffic, often by abusing network
> broadcast addresses. Compare slashdot effect."
>
> So had the person said "X has been dossed" on a technical list, it would
> have been assumed to have a completely different meaning.
>
> e.

The original WAS on a technical list, one for users of a particular crypto package (crypto++).

The post went as follows:
<begin quote>


Subj:   RE: compiling crypto++
Date:   Tue, 19 Mar 2002 2:15:04 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   Mark Winstead <Mark.Winstead at NetOctave.com>
To:   "'cryptopp-list at eskimo.com'" <cryptopp-list at eskimo.com>

Looks like your files are "dossed". If you look at the files with the right editor, you will probably see ^M at the end of each line. Depending on your available editors, there are various ways to rid this. I seem to recall there is also a flag you can use on unzip/tar/... whatever you may have used to "debundle" the package.

Mark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shawn Masters [>mailto:scm at nfr.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 1:37 PM
> To: cryptopp
> Subject: Re: compiling crypto++
>
    <snip>

> On 19 Mar 2002, Kevin J. Schmidt wrote:
>
> > I'm trying to compile crypto++ 4.2 on Linux Redhat 7.2. I copied the
> > GNUmakefile to Makefile and typed make. I get a bunch of
> errors.
<end quote>

"^M" is of course control-M which is CR (carriage return).
Context of the message, and the choice of forum, makes it clear that it was file format and not Denial-Of-Service that was being discussed.

            - Jim Landau