ASA(1) General Commands Manual ASA(1)

asa — interpret carriage-control characters


asa [file ...]

The asa utility shall write its input files to standard output, mapping carriage-control 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 are performed.

If the character removed is:

The rest of the line is output without change.
A <newline> is output, then the rest of the input line.
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 be equivalent to <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 the INPUT FILES section.

The input files shall be text files.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of asa:

Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
[ XSI] Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

The standard output shall be the text from the input file modified as described in the DESCRIPTION section.

None.

None.

None.

The following exit values shall be returned:

All input files were output successfully.
An error occurred.

Default.

None.

  1. The following command: 
    asa file

    permits the viewing of file (created by a program using FORTRAN-style carriage-control characters) on a terminal.

  2. The following command: 
    a.out | asa | lp

    formats the FORTRAN output of and directs it to the printer.

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(1) utility; see lp(1).

This utility is generally used only by FORTRAN programs. The standard developers decided to retain asa to avoid breaking the historical large base of FORTRAN applications that put carriage-control characters in their output files. 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> 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 non-portable manner.

None.

fort77(1), lp(1)

First released in Issue 4.

This utility is marked as part of the FORTRAN Runtime Utilities option.

The normative text is reworded to avoid use of the term "must" for application requirements.

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December 6, 2001 posix.fail