Stefan Drissen wrote... > Firstly a magic number is rubbish. Any operating system will have to > know beforehand what all the magic numbers signify.
Why? Only the applications that need to understand a particular filetype need to know the magic number. eg Linux itself doesn't know what 'GIF' means at the start of a file -- it attaches no significance to that. However, xv knows that 'GIF' at the start means it's a GIF image, and so can be handled appropriately. > This is an impossible task. Even if you had to distribute a list of magic numbers, /etc/magic from any unix box covers a wide range of filetypes, and is 75k on my linux box. Hardly huge, and that includes a lot that could easily be done away with for the SAM. > The OS would start out with the basic say 24 SAM file types > as magic numbers and wouldn't recognise any new ones which were created > until a new version of the OS is spread to EVERYONE. It's not the job of the OS to recognise files though (although you'd have to make array files/screen$/basic files recognisable -- probably). Like I said, it's the application that uses magic numbers. If you need the OS to understand them, get `file' and port that to the SAM. > The MSDOS extension system is rather good I think, :) > just that the names are a bit short. > So have a dos with say 24 characters for the name and 8 for the extension. 8 byte extensions???? > The extension would have to really be an extension But then the OS still has to know what all the extensions mean, doesn't it? > What have you lot got to say about that? See above ^ rjp
