Re: head and |more

[Eric Blake]

To begin with, the fact that you emailed bug-textutils
instead of bug-coreutils makes me suspect that your
version of the tools are rather outdated, and you may
be benefitted by upgrading to a newer version (the
current version is 5.93).

> When I run head, windows 2003 server standard edition, in the command 
> box I see text on the screen.
> When I use: "head a.txt |more" I get mostly ?????  with one recognizable 
> character here and there.
> The same when I do: "head a.txt > b.txt" and then I do: "type b.txt" I 
> see mostly ?????????

This sort of question is more appropriately asked to the
packager (cygwin, mingw32, etc) of the tools for Windows,
rather than this list.  In particular, cygwin.com maintains
a very good port of the coreutils, and their mailing list
is more likely to support Windows-related questions related
to the interaction with the coreutils they provide.

Furthermore, Windows `more' is incompatible with the
POSIX `more', and Windows `type' is different than
the POSIX shell builtin `type'.  Although neither of those
utilities are maintained at this list, your unexpected
behavior may be the result of mixing programs that
are trying to follow POSIX with programs that do not.

--
Eric Blake