[minicom-Bugs][304734] minicom corrupts binary file uploads

Fri Aug 17 13:10:33 UTC 2007

Bugs item #304734, was opened at 2007-08-17 13:10
Status: Open
Priority: 3
Submitted By: Nobody (None)
Assigned to: Nobody (None)
Summary: minicom corrupts binary file uploads 
Category: None
Group: None
Resolution: None

Initial Comment:
Minicom is a great tool for embedded system development, but one feature it seems to be missing out of the box are pure binary file transfer protocols.

I tried to add custom protocols using "cat" but was only partly successful: downloading seems to work but for some reason uploads are corrupted.

Here's what I configured:

   Name             Program                 Name U/D FullScr IO-Red. Multi
J  binary     /bin/cat                        Y    U    N       Y       N
K  binary     /etc/minicom/catto              Y    D    N       Y       N

with the custom script "/etc/minicom/catto" containing this text

#!/bin/sh
cat - > $1

Subsequent testing indicates that the download protocol seems to work, and the upload protocol appears to work but corrupts the data sent.  The corruption seemed to be deterministic and repeatable.  Inspection of the binary data revealed that the uploaded file was transferred correctly until the point where it contained the hex byte 1b, which is ASCII ESC.  At that point the target system failed to receive the 1b and also had some subsequent corruption in the following 10 or so bytes.  The remainder of the file seemed to transfer successfully.

Interestingly, if I followed mostly the same procedure but invoked cat manually from a separate terminal, and not as a custom protocol within minicom, the transfer was *not* corrupted.  This is my current workaround.