Does anyone know of a utility that will handle converting vms variable length record, unformatted data files to a unix compatible format? The utilities vms2tar and zip/unzip only handle set record length, formatted files.

I don't know if I can help or not.

Aren't variable length records typically text files?

1) If I remember right, can't you copy the files to a fixed length record format file? If so, then use vms2tar.

2) Try FTP from vms to unix (maybe a little niaeve of me)

Hope this helps.

Bob

The VMS CONVERT utility can manipulate your VMS files from variable length to fixed-length format.

The bigger question is whether (or not) the file's contents will be usable on UNIX. If it's strictly textual information; you should be fine on UNIX.

If, on the other hand, there's any binary data involved (integers, floatingpoint, ...) then your UNIX application is faced with understanding the VAX/VMS representation, which is not trivial.

Many times when going between different systems, binary data must be represented in vender-neutral text format for the transfer, and then converted to the vendor-specific format on the receiving end.

Not hard, not trivial either.
I've done just that with these pairing
VAX<-->IBM3090
VAX<-->SUN Sparc
VAX<-->SGI
VAX<-->PC

Does any one know how to convert the dos file to unix file format.I know there are tools like dos2unix and unix2dos on SunOS, but I wanted to write my own which should run on Windos NT/95 etc...

Help me if you have any ideas...