uudecode: Short file?

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <1991Mar9.104048.21207 at nntp-server.caltech.edu>, aabo at nntp-server.caltech.edu (Andrew Masami Abo) writes:
|> I uudecoded a uuencoded file and received the error: Short file.
|> The resulting binary file was incomplete.  What does this error
|> mean and how can I fix it?  The man page was unenlightening.
|> I examined the uuencoded file and
|> saw that both the 'begin' and 'end' statements were intact.
|> I am running on SunOS 4.1.1.

  It means that the file was missing some data.  It somehow got corrupted,
despite the fact that it contains both "begin" and "end" lines.

  If you understand the uuencode format enough (the man page for uuencode
should document the format), and if the corruption is simple, then you might
be able to load the file into an editor and figure out what's wrong with it. 
If not, you'll have to get the file again, and hope that it doesn't get
corrupted this time.

  One possibility is that there should be a line containing a backquote (`)
and nothing else right before the "end" line, and that line is missing. 
Although, given that the binary file is incomplete, it seems likely to me that
adding the line will not fix the problem, since I suspect that other data is
missing as well.

-- 
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