How do UNIX files work? Is there a header of some sort?
BTW, I think it's an incredible pain that the Mac has no built in
way to change file types. If they get lost, I have to used DiskEdit
or some such thing to restore them.
>
>Even the Mac or its apps seemed to be confused about the nature of
>what should be in the resource fork - some apps stored all their
>data there, using it as a sort of mini-database of tagged chunks
>of data. If there's anything classic about today's computers,
>it's the nearly universal recognition that a file's a file.
>Departures from this are interesting but rare.
>
>The other non-file info such as the filename itself, the date stamp,
>attributes, etc. are treated in an incidental fashion. The Amiga
>file system, for example, had a "file comment" of about 80 characters
>of extra text to describe the file that wasn't always preserved.
>This may have been inherited from Tripos.
>
>And then there's the way something like the effects of Radix-50
>(packing three chars into two bytes) has percolated through the
>years as three-character filename extensions from RT-11 (or
>earlier?) to CP/M to DOS and Windows, which are overused and
>abused in many ways.
>
>One of my latest three-great-ideas-before-breakfast ideas is
>to write a program for Windows that sniffs and identifies files
>in the manner of Unix's "file". That's the problem with files as
>files: you can easily lose track of what's in them, especially
>if you lose that three-char extension, or it gets wrapped in
>an archive format or attachment, etc.
>
>- John
>Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
>
>
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Received on Wed Jun 10 1998 - 16:56:40 BST