Is /etc/magic machine independent?
Guy Harris
guy at auspex.auspex.com
Thu Apr 11 04:18:46 AEST 1991
>Is file's magic number database (/etc/magic) machine independant
>or must you have a different version for big and little endian
>machines?
"string" entries are machine-independent. "short" and "long" entries
are machine-dependent. It would be nice if 1) there were "cstring"
entries, which would look like "string" entries except that they could
include C-style escapes, e.g.
0 cstring \037\036 packed data
0 cstring \377\037 compacted data
0 cstring \037\235 compressed data,
>2 byte&0x80 >0 block compressed,
>2 byte&0x1f x %d bits
0 cstring \032\001 Compiled Terminfo Entry
(the "byte&0x80" and "byte&0x1f" are Sun enhancements; "file" should be
taught to support them as well - Sun's "file" supports C-style strings
with "string", which wasn't really the right thing to do, as it means
any string containing backslashes has to escape the backslases, e.g.
0 string \\begindata Andrew Toolkit document
) and 2) there were "beshort", "belong", "leshort", and "lelong"
entries, which would be for "short" and "long" quantities to be
interpreted as big-endian and little-endian values, rather than being
interpreted in the native byte order.
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