Consultant pilot fish has 25 years of experience as a mainframe programmer and database administrator when this company asks him to come on the payroll.

“I transferred into a Unix system administrator position to expand my skill set, and things looked set for an exciting few productive years before I retired,” fish says.

“But there was a departmental reorganization and Barney, the new head of sysadmins, prefers his young staff to older heads. I was shifted to administering an application we support. Oh well.”

But one day fish finds that a log file is unreadable. The Unix “cat” command, which dumps the contents of a file to the terminal screen, makes it clear that the log file is now type binary.

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