ASA(1) General Commands Manual ASA(1)

asa — interpret carriage-control characters

This utility is optional. It shall be provided on systems that support the FOR - TRAN Runtime Utilities Option.

asa [file ...]

The asa utility shall write its input files to standard output, mapping carriagecontrol characters from the text files to line-printer control sequences in an implementation-defined manner. The first character of every line shall be removed from the input, and the following actions shall be performed: If the character removed is: <space> The rest of the line shall be output without change. 0 A <newline> shall be output, then the rest of the input line. 1 One or more implementation-defined characters that causes an advance to the next page shall be output, followed by the rest of the input line. + The <newline> of the previous line shall be replaced with one or more implementation-defined characters that causes printing to return to column position 1, followed by the rest of the input line. If the + is the first character in the input, it shall have the same effect as <space>. The action of the asa utility is unspecified upon encountering any character other than those listed above as the first character in a line.

None.

file

A pathname of a text file used for input. If no file operands are specified, the standard input shall be used.

The standard input shall be used only if no file operands are specified. See Input Files.

The input files shall be text files.

C FORTRAN Development and Runtime Utilities Options

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of asa:

This variable shall determine the locale to use for the locale categories when both LC_ALL and the corresponding environment variable (beginning with LC_ ) do not specify a locale. See 2.6.

This variable shall determine the locale to be used to override any values for locale categories specified by the settings of LANG or any environment variables beginning with LC_.

This variable shall determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (e.g., single- versus multibyte characters in arguments and input files).

This variable shall determine the language in which messages should be written.

Default.

The standard output shall be the text from the input file modified as described in C.1.2.

None.

None.

None.

The asa utility shall exit with one of the following values:

All input files were output successfully.

An error occurred.

Default.

The asa utility is needed to map ‘‘standard’’ FORTRAN 77 output into a form acceptable to contemporary printers. Usually asa is used to pipe data to the lp utility (see lp in lp(1) .) The following command: asa file permits the viewing of file (created by a program using FORTRAN -style carriage control characters) on a terminal. The following command: a.out | asa | lp formats the FORTRAN output of a.out and directs it to the printer.

This utility is generally used only by FORTRAN programs. It was moved to this annex in response to multiple ballot objections requesting its removal. The working group decided to retain asa to avoid breaking the existing large base of FOR - TRAN applications that put carriage control characters in their output files. This is a compromise position to achieve balloting acceptance: the overhead of maintaining a separate option in . 2 for just this one utility is seen to be small in comparison to the benefit achieved for FORTRAN applications. Since it is a separate option, there is no requirement that a system have a FORTRAN compiler in order to run applications that need asa. Historical implementations have used an ASCII <form-feed> character in response to a ’1’, and an ASCII <carriage-return> in response to a ’+’. It is suggested that implementations treat characters other than ’0’, ’1’, and ’+’ as <space> in the absence of any compelling reason to do otherwise. However, the action is listed here as ‘‘unspecified,’’ permitting an implementation to provide extensions to access fast multiple line slewing and channel seeking in a nonportable manner.

C FORTRAN Development and Runtime Utilities Options

September 1991 posix.fail