file attributes

[Tim Smith]

Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: file attributes ( actually Macintosh file system )
References: <232 at cmu-cs-wb1.ARPA>

But the Mac does not have pipes or IO redirection.  Hence the problem of
knowing what is IN a file does not come up.  The only general purpose
programs that look at a MusicWorks file, for example, are MusicWorks and
the Finder ( and the Finder just looks enough to find out that MusicWorks
should be dealing with the file ).

Comparing the Mac to UNIX is quite interesting.  For example, it is not
clear that pipes on a machine like the Mac would be anywhere near as
useful as they are on UNIX.  Most of the stuff poeple send down pipes
is ascii text, whereas on a Mac, one does not tend to have very many
text files.  Grep UNIX | wc on a MacWrite file, for example, would not
be very likely to find the number of occurences of the word "UNIX".

I find that I like many of the ideas in the Mac file system, and I like most
of the ideas in the UNIX file system, but I don't see any good way to combine
the best of both without hurting either.  But it's fun to try!
-- 
					Tim Smith
				ihnp4!{wlbr!callan,cithep}!tim