file attributes

[klaus u schallhorn]

In article <DPASSAGE.91Jun20001100 at soda.berkeley.edu> dpassage at soda.berkeley.edu (David G. Paschich) writes:
>In article <1743 at sranha.sra.co.jp> erik at sra.co.jp, 
>	(Erik M. van der Poel) writes:
>
>   It is almost possible to create a Mac-like interface on Unix, but this
>   involves incredibly convoluted methods such as keying off of the name
>   of the file, or checking the contents of the file for certain known
>   properties of an application's files. Again, there are no standards in
>   this area. Unix needs to be extended to allow attaching all sorts of
>   attributes to files. The inode is not extensible.
>
>[stuff removed by dgp]
>
>I think a better solution than extending the Unix file system in this
>way would be to create a file, named say .desktop (or something more
>clever to avoid lawsuits :) which would contain this information, and
>then writing some library calls which would maintain this information
>and make it available to programs.  This also makes the code a lot
>more portable since it doesn't rely on the particular Unix providing
>the facilities you describe.
>


What's wrong with file(1) and a proper /etc/magic table? mine is 111 lines
and recognises all the file types I care about.

As an aside, a system's usefulness will be highly impaired by forcing
users to use program x with files of type y. That may be permissible on
MacChickenBurger Boxes but not on my systems.

klaus schallhorn
-- 
George Orwell was an Optimist