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On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 06:58:49PM -0600, Luke Kanies wrote: > On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > > > >> Not that any platform is substantially better at this. > > > > Traditional UNIX apps used to look for files with the right extensions > > but happily ignore them if you told them otherwise, with a few > > exceptions (eg, the old trick of linking "tty.c" to "/dev/tty" so you > > could type code in and avoid creating a file). > > Traditional Unix apps don't seem to do anything with extensions; they don't > really seem to do any sort of filetype recognition at all, from what I can > tell. I'm sure there are exceptions, but everything I've seen just uses > extensions for the humans. HTTP servers often use file extensions to determine which MIME type to sell the document for. Mail clients often do the same when you attach a file. Make is the classical example of a traditional Unix application that use extensions to "do something". I think that using file extensions without an governing body to decide what an extension means sucks. I think that using magic bytes without a governing body to determine what which byte mean sucks as well. Both suck because anyone can pick anything, and clashes are determined too late. But worse are OSses where some applications use magic bytes, and some applications use extensions. Abigail
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