piping out binaries properly

[Paul Rubin]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> writes:
> > I've written lots of things whose standard out was designed
> > specifically to be read by another program, but never as binary data.
> 
> Plenty of applications use that functionality and depend on it.  See
> cjpeg, djpeg, the pbmplus library, and so forth.

Also "tar cf files... | compress > tarball.Z" used to be a standard
idiom, now replaced by "tar cfz ..." which does about the same thing under
the covers.