What are ASCII and Binary modes?
Most FTP clients offer three modes of transfering files (were not talking about CHMOD here, this is the mode of the data stream itself during the transfer). The options are ASCII, Binary and Auto (or AutoDetect). Using Auto is a sometimes iffy proposition as I’ve had it tranfer files in the wrong mode before so I always specify which mode to use for transfer. • ASCII – All text based documents such as HTML docs, text docs, data files, etc must be transfered in ASCII mode. Sometimes they will transfer in binary, sometimes they won’t. Always use ASCII for text files (that is, files you can open and read). • Binary – Basically anything that you can’t open and read is a binary file. What this mostly applies to in the world of the web is Image files. Be they GIF, JPG, or JPEG, they are all Binary files. If you transfer an image it must be transfered in Binary mode otherwise it will not display correctly. • Perl Programs – Any .pl or .cgi program you transfer via FTP MUST BE TRANSFERED IN AS
