> This addition helped my scripts become a little more streamlined, but
> of course puts in an additional entry into the source file I need to
> track. As file name extensions don't always work across all sorts of
> systems, many still hamstrung by 8.3, what is the preferred or
> recommend mechanism for checking file types the Plan 9 way since we no
> longer have the System V magic?
i'm pretty confused by what you're saying here. why doesn't file(1) work?
are you saying there's something wrong with editing the source as opposed
to to editing a configuration file?
either way your system is equally non-standard. in either event,
submitting a patch and having it accepted is the only way around this.
> In a sense, a modified xd(1) that has an option for a restricted range
> of byte sequences would work. That would at least provide a fast seek
> into a file that can be pipelined into any other command sequence--no
> need to dump the whole file when you just need to the first four
> bytes, but then it just gets to the point of having a magic file.
why would xd need modification? how about
dd -if $infile -bs $nbytes -count 1 | xd
there are no restrictions placed by dd on $nbytes. it could be
4 or 99132 or whatever. dd's -iseek option similarly can specify
any offset.
- erik
