From: Alain Nadeau 
At 09:03 15.10.97 -0400, you wrote:
Well not only did they not know C, but they obviously didn't know much UNIX
either... I quite enjoy TSE (and I wouldn't want to start a war or
anything), but any UNIX system has got lots of extremely powerful text
manipulating tools (most painfully lacking under win-dos) which would have
allowed for an easy solution to their problem without the whole to-and-fro.
I usually do exactly the opposite: any major text manipulating job I need
to do on my Dos-Win PC at work I take home to do in a few seconds on my
Linux machine...
Best to all,
Alain.
>Just something a few of you might grin about, raised more than a few
>eyebrows among those ignorant of TSE/Qedit & Semware.  I was
>working at a site doing some grinding/boring file translation
>programming when a problem came up in a 16MB data file on the
>Unix system (was doing Unix-to-PC conversion programs).  The
>programmers were aghast as they don't know C (weird, huh) and
>they had no utilities on the system which would/could correct
>some garbled characters within a single record.  For some reason
>(can't recall what it was) they sure didn't want to delete & recreate
>the offending record, so they came begging me to "write a program
>to fix it".  
>
>While they were transferring the file from the Unix system to a PC
>(at a blazing 9600 baud!) I took all of 2-3 minutes to look over one
>of my programs and decide how to modify it to make the fix.  All
>of a sudden a light bulb came on and I thought, "gee, I've got
>TSE on a disk in my kit, why not see if I couldn't use it?!"  With
>several people hovering around me, I loaded TSE with the offending
>file (took a minute or so) in binary mode, put spaces over the
>bad characters, then took another minute or so to save the huge
>file.  After they transferred the file back to Unix and ran a report
>to confirm the fix, I had more than a few questions about Semware,
>TSE and Qedit (which they had on site but didn't know it).  Don't
>know if I made any sales for Semware, but TSE (once again)
>sure saved me some time and effort.
>
>Thanks much!!
>
>Andy
>
>
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Dr. Alain Nadeau				alain.nadeau@unifr.ch
Medieval Studies Institute		Fax: (+41) (26) 300 9700
University of Fribourg
CH-1700 Fribourg
Switzerland
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