KB197158 - FORTRAN Carriage Control or FORTRAN Control Code

Article ID: 197158

Article Last Modified on 10/31/2006

Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition

This article was previously published under Q197158

SUMMARY

Print jobs from computer systems running the UNIX operating system and its derivatives are commonly text based. These may print with a single unexpected character in the first column. This character is a FORTRAN control code. In a network trace, it will come across as an "r" option, but at the client console interface level, it is also commonly called the -f or -cc option.

MORE INFORMATION

RFC 1179 for LPR printing dated August 1990 has a section defining suggested behavior for line printer daemon (LPD) servers if they support FORTRAN codes. See the quoted text below.

7.26 r - File to print with FORTRAN carriage control codes

      +---+------+----+
      | r | file | LF |
      +---+------+----+
      Command code - 'r'
      Operand - File to print

   This command causes the data file to be printed, interpreting the first
   column of each line as FORTRAN carriage control. The FORTRAN standard
   limits this to blank, "1", "0", and "+" carriage controls. Most FORTRAN
   programmers also expect "-" (triple space) to work as well.

Microsoft has not implemented this functionality in its implementation of the LPD server.

REFERENCES

For additional information, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

124735 Windows NT LPD Server Implements LPR Control Characters

124734 Text of RFC1179 Standard for Windows NT TCP/IP Printing

Keywords: kbinfo KB197158