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Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #312852] Wed, 09 April 2008 22:55 Go to next message
rleishman
Messages: 3728
Registered: October 2005
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Senior Member
It's a reasonably common occurrence to corrupt a binary file when pulling it from Unix to Windows with the Windows FTP client.

The reason is because the Windows FTP client (and some others) default to ASCII mode, which translates Unix linefeed characters (CHR(10)) to Linefeed / Carriage Return ( CHR(10)+CHR(13) ).

Typically, you don't know you've done it until you try to use the file. Not so tragic if it's a JPEG photo of your mum, not so good if its a database backup.

This happend to us (backup, not photo of Mum).

Since the action of ASCII FTP is deterministic, it is actually reversible. Sadly you cannot just FTP it back in ASCII mode - I think that just blindly strips AND CHR(13) - which could occur naturally in a binary file. But below is a nice Perl script that does the job.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

# File: unftp.pl
# Description: Restores a binary file corrupted by ASCII FTP
#              from Unix to Windoze
# Syntax: unftp.pl infilename > outfilename

use strict;
my $chr;
my $prv;
my $cr = chr(13);
my $lf = chr(10);
my $crlf = chr(13) . chr(10);

my $iscr = 0;

my $fname = shift @ARGV || die "Expecting file name";

open (INP, "<$fname") || die $!;

while (read(INP, $chr, 65536) ) {

        $chr = $cr . $chr if $iscr;

        $iscr = 0;
        if (substr($chr, length($chr)-1, 1) eq $cr) {
                $chr = substr($chr, 0, length($chr)-1);
                $iscr = 1;
        }

        $chr =~ s/$crlf/$lf/g;
        print $chr;
}
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #312889 is a reply to message #312852] Thu, 10 April 2008 01:11 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Michel Cadot
Messages: 68625
Registered: March 2007
Location: Nanterre, France, http://...
Senior Member
Account Moderator
Thanks for this tool.

Regards
Michel
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #312969 is a reply to message #312852] Thu, 10 April 2008 04:20 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Littlefoot
Messages: 21806
Registered: June 2005
Location: Croatia, Europe
Senior Member
Account Moderator
Quote:
This happend to us (backup, not photo of Mum).
LOL!

Quote:
Since the action of ASCII FTP is deterministic, it is actually reversible. Sadly you cannot just FTP it back in ASCII mode
That was my very first reaction (without any thinking about the problem) - why not FTP it back in ASCII and once again in binary?

Michel said the rest.
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #313155 is a reply to message #312969] Thu, 10 April 2008 22:20 Go to previous messageGo to next message
rleishman
Messages: 3728
Registered: October 2005
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Senior Member
Glad to help - hope you never need it.

We had a tense time for a while. We're in early design phase - too early to acquire a dev environment - so we Frankensteined a PC and made a "sandpit" server for a proof-of-concept. As part of it, we developed a bunch of prototypes that would prove valuable when we came to Dev.

Since we're a bunch of undisciplined techos, we installed 11g to check it out. But when it came time to get serious, we had to blow it away and revert to 10g.

Initially we thought it was not a corruption but a versioning problem - none of us are DBAs (hence the lax backup strategy in first place!). So we got a DBA in to reinstall 11g properly and confirmed that the backups were truly corrupt.

Since every backup was affected, FTP seemed the likely culprit.

Lucky the Unix->Win ASCII transform is deterministic and additive. We would have been in real trouble the other way around where the transformation is destructive.

Ross Leishman
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #314070 is a reply to message #313155] Tue, 15 April 2008 14:35 Go to previous messageGo to next message
andrew again
Messages: 2577
Registered: March 2000
Senior Member
Couple of other ways (probably not all suitable for BINARY files)...
-- convert ^M (DOS style to Unix style)
in.txt
-------
line1^M
line2^M
line3^M

/tmp>>col < in.txt > out.txt
/tmp>>od -c in.txt          
0000000   l   i   n   e   1  \r  \n   l   i   n   e   2  \r  \n   l   i
0000020   n   e   3  \r  \n
0000025
/tmp>>od -c out.txt
0000000   l   i   n   e   1  \n   l   i   n   e   2  \n   l   i   n   e
0000020   3  \n
0000022

perl -pi -e "s:^V^M::g" <filenames>

cat <filename1> | tr -d "^V^M" > <newfile>

sed -e "s/^V^M//" <filename> > <output filename>

On HP-UX try dos2ux or dos2unix on Solaris.
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #314480 is a reply to message #314070] Wed, 16 April 2008 19:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
andrew again
Messages: 2577
Registered: March 2000
Senior Member
More solutions worth trying that I spotted on http://www.softpanorama.org/Scripting/Perlorama/perl_in_command_line.shtml

perl -p -i -e 's/'

or

tr -d "\015"
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #314510 is a reply to message #314480] Thu, 17 April 2008 00:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
rleishman
Messages: 3728
Registered: October 2005
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Senior Member
The problem with tr -d "\015" is that it blanket removes CR characters, which can occur naturally in a binary file. The same is true of all of @AA's solutions (I think - didn't test)

I'm not sure about the Perl one. I thought the s// operator required two arguments. This syntax failed on my Linux box.
perl -p -i -e 's/' < b > c
Substitution pattern not terminated at -e line 1.


Ross Leishman
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #351434 is a reply to message #312852] Tue, 30 September 2008 17:59 Go to previous messageGo to next message
dgdot
Messages: 2
Registered: September 2008
Junior Member

I realize this is an extremely old post, but it's actually the only solution I've been able to find addressing the recovery of images transferred in ASCII mode.
Can anyone assist with rleishman's script solution?
I've got the correct perl path, named the file unftp.pl, placed it in my cgi-bin folder, cmod it 755, and placed the images in the same folder.
However when I run the script, I get an internal server error.
Can anyone assist? Many thanks
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #378928 is a reply to message #351434] Fri, 02 January 2009 13:11 Go to previous messageGo to next message
dgdot
Messages: 2
Registered: September 2008
Junior Member

Hopefully this helps the next person searching for help on this issue: Simple solution. You'll need a decent hex editor. I used Hex Editor Neo. It has a good batch find/replace feature.
Search for the following string (hex bytes): "0d 0a" and replace it with "0a". Replace every instance in your file.
Re: Resurrect a backup corrupted by FTP (ASCII) [message #390495 is a reply to message #378928] Fri, 06 March 2009 10:43 Go to previous message
gregbahun
Messages: 1
Registered: March 2009
Location: McMaster University
Junior Member
dgdot - THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

to reiterate what dgdot said:

Hopefully this helps the next person searching for help on this issue: Simple solution. You'll need a decent hex editor. I used Hex Editor Neo. It has a good batch find/replace feature.
Search for the following string (hex bytes): "0d 0a" and replace it with "0a". Replace every instance in your file.

i'm a chemistry grad student who inadvertently transferred my raw NMR data via FTP and didn't realized the FTP client transferred the binary data as ASCII files. i was trying various NMR programs to process the data, and at first the programs all sucked. but, it was pointed the problem was the binary to ASCII conversion. i applied the method above suggested by dgdot and it worked like a charm. the only thing - there are text files in the folders from the NMR data. so, I did a search for those txt files in those folders, and made them all read only. after this, the hex editor neo did not change those files - but it did change everything else (in a bulk (or batch) method) and i am now able to open those nmr data files and process them and get good spectra.

holy crap...thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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