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- A Downside to Unix: Dealing With Binary Files
- Using unix tools has one major downside when it comes to graphics: most graphics are "binary files"
- Binary files are any files which use 8-bit encoding; if you've ever opened up a graphics file in a text program and seen the results, that's 8-bit encoding.
- Graphics files -- GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, Illustrator, you name it -- are almost exclusively 8-bit
- Most Unix files are text files, using 7-bit encoding
- And most Unix programs deal with 7-bit clean files as input; tossing those program 8-bit files can bring some unexpected results.
- So when looking at many Unix tools, you need to watch out for how they deal with 8-bit files; sometimes the results are quite.. interesting
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