Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?

[Karl Heuer]

In article <2500 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>[In VMS] the default type of a file opened from a C program is stream-LF,
>which uses records terminated by linefeeds, and does not distinguish between
>text and binary formats at all, acting like UNIX and POSIX files.

The fact that it's called "stream-LF" (as distinct from "stream-CR" or just
"stream") suggests that the newlines which terminate the records have some
significance to the OS.  Is it legal, for example, to write 70000 characters
without a newline?  If not, this doesn't seem like an acceptable format for
binary mode.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint