Recover a binary file

[Mike Campbell]

Okay, since I’ve succeeded in shooting myself in the foot, does anyone have an idea how or if you can recover a binary file that was transferred as ascii?

Now, after the collective laughing has stopped, any thoughts or ideas would be helpful.

Thanks.

Mike Campbee

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[David Barr]

You probably can’t. Assuming you went from Windows to Unix, the CRLF pairs were changed to LF, but there were probably also some LFs that weren’t next to a CR, so replacing all the LFs with CRLF won’t work.

[Mike Campbell]

Linux to Unix transfer.  So Windows is out of the picture.

[David Barr]

This probable depends on which FTP server software you use. I did some testing with our software (Pure-FTPd), and I wasn’t able to recover the file.

You could try FTPing the file through the same FTP server in the opposite direction (PUT instead of GET or vice versa) to see if that reverses the changes, but that didn’t seem to help in my testing.

[Author]

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