On Tuesday 01 March 2011 01:31:52 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... > > > I think that I agree with you on all counts. I can understand if the path > > stuff > > can't deal with / or \ in file names (that's probably not worth trying to > > get to > > work right), but it _should_ be able to handle directories with dots in > > them and > > files with no extension. Files without extension may be uncommon in > > Windows, but > > they're common enough on Linux. > > Due to the practical need for dealing with Unixy systems (for instance, an > external web server) and cross-OS compatibility, etc, I deal with > extension-less files (and filenames that start with a dot) quite frequently > even on Windows, and even though I'm primarily a Windows user. > > That reminds me of something I've often wondered, though: Does unix > consider a file named ".bashrc" to be a nameless file with an extension of > "bashrc", or just an extentionless file named ".bashrc"? (I know unix > doesn't typically have a concept of file extension, it's all just part of > the name, but unix programs will often care about the extension portion of > a filename.)
If a program were trying to treat .bashrc like it had an extension, I would expect it to be treated as a file with no name and bashrc as its extension. I don't think that anything else mould make sense. However, it's a prime example of a situation where extensions make no sense. In general, Linux isn't big on extensions. The DEs generally use MIME types to determine the type of a file rather than its extension, and most programs follow suit. But in the rare case where a program would care about extensions, I would expect it to be looking for _specific_ extensions (like mp3 or flac or pdf or whatever), so it wouldn't be looking for a .bashrc file and it wouldn't really matter if it treated its extension as bashrc. - Jonathan M Davis
