ASA(1)

📦 version 1.053, in alpine 3.24

💅 ASA(1) — asa, bestie 💖

okay so this is asa(1) from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, and it's literally the carriag-control decoder of your dreams ✨

✨ NAME ✨

asa — interpret ASA/FORTRAN carriage-controls 🚂💨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

asa [filename ...]

like, that's it. that's the whole vibe. you just hand it filenames and she goes 🔥

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so picture this: traditional FORTRAN programs put carriage-control characters in the first columns of their output 👀 and those got interpreted by older lineprinters according to the ASA vertical format control standard — and yes, ASA was the American Standards Association, which is now ANSI, iykyk 🎀

under this standard, the first character of each printable record (line) determines vertical spacing, like this:

  blank    carriage return 0           two carriage returns 1
  Formfeed +           overprint -           three carriage returns
  (IBM extension)

(read the pairs out of those columns: blank = carriage return, 0 = two carriage returns, 1 = three carriage returns, + = Formfeed, and - = overprint — that last one's the IBM extension 💅)

all other characters are discarded 🗑️ and empty lines behave as though they have a leading blank, periodt.

asa interprets these characters. that's the whole job. she's an icon, she's a legend, she's the main character 👑

🎀 EXIT VALUES 🎀

  • 0 — normal exit, we love a clean getaway 🫶
  • 1 — inability to write on stdout or to read an input file 😭
  • 2 — bad argument 🙈

these exit status values were chosen from MKS toolkit ngl 💜

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

Jeffrey S. Haemer 🫡✨ (we stan)

💀 BUGS 💀

okay so currently, asa just looks at the readability of its input files at startup time. it should really do it a file at a time, but that makes the code look gross 😭 fr fr, the author said it, not me.

the carriage-control - is an IBM extension. perhaps the default should ignore it, and there should be a -i option to interpret it 👀 (that's a maybe, bestie, not a promise)

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

  • Communications of the ACM, Vol 7, No. 10, p. 606, October 1964. 📚
  • NWG/RFC 189, Appendix C 🦋
go forth and decode those carriage controls, bestie. the lineprinters believe in you 💖✨

mwah 💋 — this has been perl v5.42.2, dated 2026-02-15, signing off for ASA(1) 🎀🫶

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