gzip or FTP problem?

I hope someone can help me on this little problem.

Bit of background first. I've dumped an Oracle database to a plain text file that I wish to gzip then transfer via ftp to another machine. The dump and gzip runs fine and if I gunzip the file while still in unix the file looks fine. The problems occur once the file is FTP to a windows NT machine. The transfer goes fine and I end up with a zipped file on Windows that I can unzip using Winzip. The unzipped file opens ok as well. All looks ok until you scroll down to around the 1000 record. After then all the text is screwed up with all the spacing wrong.

It appears the the FTP transfer may be causing problems. The file is 500K before gzip and around 18K after. If the file is transfered without any compression then it opens without any problems at all.

Does anyone have any ideas why it is doing this or any other possible reasons?

The file needs to be compressed because it is too large to send across a slow link that we are using and ftp is the only real option we have for an automated transfer.

Thanks.

Are you using gzip to create a *.gz file or a *.zip file? gzip has limitations in creating a .zip file, and winzip has limitations opening .gz file (in my experience - they've both given me quite a headache in a similar situation). What worked best for me to get files from NT to Unix and back was to install the 'zip' utility on the Unix end. Check here for zip:
ftp ftp.uu.net
cd /.vol/1/archiving/zip/UNIX

I hope this helps you out.

Also check your FTP transfer mode: ASCII or binary. In this case I'd assume binary is the appropriate setting.