PuTTY wish line-endings

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summary: Line ending conversion ("ASCII mode") in PSCP and PSFTP
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: dormant: This is an old feature request that we no longer think is relevant.

Possibly line-end conversion in PSCP and PSFTP. An option to turn it on, an option (enabled by default) to turn it off, and perhaps an option to try to auto-detect whether to turn it on or not. (Anyone know a good heuristic for distinguishing text from binary files? infozip has one, as does less; anyone want to comment on which is better or whether there are better still?)

Heuristics shouldn't now be needed at the protocol end for SFTP, as SSH_FXF_TEXT has now been proposed as of SFTP v4 (see draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-05). I don't know what implementations exist.

(However, note that this version of the protocol does not allow the server to give hints to the client about whether the file is best opened in text or binary mode, so the operation of "get" would have to be manually switched by "text" and "binary" commands or similar.)

(The SCP protocol continues to have no notion of transferring a file in anything other than binary mode.)

For "put", should we require explicit triggering of this mechanism for local files via a command/option, or should we have a "guess" mode? If the latter, I think we should be able to spot and cope with Unix-style files on a Windows system.

SGT, 2024-11-17: classifying this wish as dormant: Windows text-handling tools (editors in particular) seem to have become more tolerant of LF-only lines these days, so this seems less vital than it was.

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2024-11-17 14:53:03 +0000)