On Aug 16, 2007, at 2:05 PM, David Livesay wrote: > Thank you all very much. > > This particular script is a wrapper for a bunch of shell script > snippets (written before I got comfortable with shell scripting--if > one can ever be said to be comfortable with shell scripting). So it > looks like the text returned from the shell scripts is UTF-16. > That's another surprise to me, because UTF-8 is a sort of universal > Unix convention. Files you create by redirection (i.e. > or >>) are > UTF-8, at least I think so. Of course, if you cat a file that's > UTF-16 and redirect it to a file it should still be UTF-16 unless > you do something to convert it. In this script it just logs the > result of runpsynch. > > So what encoding does 'as string' give you, Mac Roman? I think so. It used to. It only really matters for "high ascii" and even then not so much. I also think that some of it varies by system. I ran tests on different operating systems and for when I didn't specify the output type they were written out the same.(all macroman or all utf8 not sure which)