Hello chen! On Thu, 30 December 1999 at 08:51:19, you wrote: > > The program creating the file can record the file type when creating it. > There can be a default file type umask
Looks reasonable but I doubt that it works without problems. Too simple and much too weak if you ask me. > It can be controled from command line by chtype [file] [type] That's what our clumsy *.foo.bar conventions did for ages. ;-) > I don't think it should be verified. if the type is wrong, the program > trying to use it will complain nicely How can it complain? It relied exclusively on the type the filesystem gave out! And if it cannot rely on this - what is it good for? > > - types would need to be determined from the data alone so > > that foo.txt would be clearly identifiable as X-Bitmap if > > foo.txt's data is a valid X-Bitmap - but what are you going > > to do about foo.txt.gz? After all - you are still interested > > in the X-Bitmap and you probably regard compression as something > > that should be somewhat transparent, don't you. > > no it can be identified as gzip compressed file. It can - but it would be most convenient if compression would be transparent. > What I'm suggesting is to save the info in the file system itself. > I think that because of the way hurd implements file systems, it > may work nicely. Nobody is going to stop you from hacking your own file system servers - I would still suggest you take a look at the URL "http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/magic-numbers/"; - perhaps this project is not as dead as I thought. ;-) (There is also a Mailing List Archive online at the following URL: "http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/magic-numbers/mail-archive/"; - you may consider "man file" for a smooth introduction to the wonderful world of magic numbers.) Besides - a web server such as apache might even benefit from a file system that carries type information, so feel free to implement one. /bye Dirk
