On Sat, 01 Jan 2000 10:41:17 +0100, the world broke into rejoicing as Dirk Ritter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Hello Christopher Browne! > > On Fri, 31 December 1999 at 22:07:49, you wrote: > > [*.c associations] > > ... And with a print utility ... > > And with an indentation tool and a source code analyzer and a spill > checker and a documentation generation system and ... oh dear - > where is bash - give my shell back to me and get me outta here! ;-)
Indeed. > > I'm not sure that the EA necessarily needs to go with the file in this > > case. I suspect that putting the control information in something > > like unto ~/.mailcap > > Why record type information at all? I didn't say "type information." > I got curious and proved it - > even 'file' as it exists today spits out type information for > roughly 100 files within two seconds or less. Of course - I have > a reasonably fast SCSI disk and 800 Bogomips, but when I ran it > a second time it was just about as fast as a directory listing. > Are you guys sure that information which can be gathered as fast > is really worth recording? I have considerable doubts about it. > Besides - 'file' already has great knowledge about file types, so > why try reinventing the wheel? Why even think about the good old > stone axe if you can do it with power tools? > (Of course plain text vs. english text vs. not very english text is > a bit spotty but this can be forgiven since 'file' even identifies > a GNU/Linux Software Map as such (ever read about LSM entries?).) ;-) I fully agree that using "file" is a tremendous idea. By the way, if it's not fast enough as-is, reading through a text file, it would make sense to build a version that hashes that into a DBM table, thus reducing time and disk accesses to pretty much O(1). [Parallel this with using a DBM'ed /etc/passwd file; many UNIXes come with utilities that can compile /etc/passwd into /etc/passwd.dbm, so that if the DBM file is there, and is newer that /etc/passwd, you can get *real* fast access. Or look at the file I run "file" on, namely /etc/aliases.db, which is another example of this...] But this digresses from the *true* issue. The *true* issue is not so much determining the file type as it is determining what to do *as a result of the file type.* We can use /etc/magic (or /etc/magic.dbm) to determine that the file is of some type. For instance: # file /etc/aliases.db /etc/aliases.db: Berkeley DB 2.X Hash/Little Endian (Version 5, Logical sequence number: file - 0, offset - 0, Bucket Size 4096, Overflow Point 2, Last Freed 0, Max Bucket 3, High Mask 0x3, Low Mask 0x1, Fill Factor 0, Number of Keys 0) What that *doesn't* tell us is the *control* information of what program to use to *process* it. *THAT* is the thorny issue under discussion. /etc/mailcap contains correspondences between MIME types and programs to be used to process those types; *that* is what is being discussed. -- "...Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows NT (also known as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)." -- Matt Welsh [EMAIL PROTECTED] - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>