9.1 newform

The FreeForm ND-based program newform⁴ is a general tool for changing the format of a data file. The only required command line argument, if you use FreeForm ND naming conventions, is the name of the input data file. The reformatted data is written to standard output (the screen) unless you specify an output file. If you reformat to binary, you will generally want to store the output in a file.

You must create a format description file (or files) with format descriptions for the data files involved in a conversion before you can use newform to perform the conversion. The standard extension for format description files is .fmt. If you do not explicitly specify the format description file on the command line, which is unnecessary if you use FreeForm ND naming conventions, newform follows the FreeForm ND search sequence to find a format file.

For details about FreeForm ND naming conventions and the search sequence, see Chapter 8.

The newform command has the following form:

newform input_file [-f format_file] [-if input_format_file] [-of output_format_file]

[-ft "title"] [-ift "title"] [-oft "title"] [-b local_buffer_size] [-c count] [-v var_file] [-q query_file] [-o output_file]

If you want to convert an ASCII file to a binary file, and you follow the FreeForm ND naming conventions, the command is simply:

newform datafile.dat -o datafile.bin 

where datafile is the file name of your choosing.

If data files and format files are not in the current directory or in the same directory, you can specify the appropriate path name. For example, if the input data file is not in the current directory, you can enter:

newform /path/datafile.dat -o datafile.bin

To read the data in the resulting binary file, you can reformat back to ASCII using the command:

newform datafile.bin -o datafile.ext 

or you can use the readfile program, described in Section 9.3.