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9.4.3 Reconverting to Native Format

Use the following newform command to reformat the binary data in latlon.bin to its native ASCII format:

newform latlon.bin -o latlon.rf 

The ASCII file latlon.rf matches (but does not overwrite) the original input file latlon.dat. You can confirm this by using a file comparison utility. The diff command is generally available on Unix platforms.

To use diff to compare the latlon ASCII files, enter the command:

diff latlon.dat latlon.rf 

The output should be something along these lines:

Files are effectively identical. 

Several implementations of the diff utility don't print anything if the two input files are identical.

 

NOTE: The diff utility may detect a difference in other similar

cases because FreeForm ND adds a leading zero in front of a decimal and interprets a blank as a zero if the field is described as a number. (A blank described as a character is interpreted as a blank.)


Tom Sgouros and James Gallagher, 2006-02-12

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