Unix file extensions (Was: make apache2 serve file as htmL...)

[John Macdonald]

On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 03:47:27PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 1/15/07, John Macdonald <john-Z7w/En0MP3xWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >So, the gcc man page does not agree with you that file name
> >suffices may not be called extensions unless they are enforced
> >by the operating system and/or file system.
> 
> I guess I should submit a bug report.
> 
> Because There Are No Extensions on many of the relevant platforms.

Well, you can also submit similar bug reports for man pages for:
    a2ping
    apropos
    apt-ftparchive
    bibtex
    bison
    brltty
    c++, c, cpp (generated from source text related to the gcc man page source)
    capinfos
    cli
    compose
    ctangle, cweave, cweb
    cue2toc
    dar, dar_static
    dh_compress, dh_installchangelogs, dh_installman, dh_installmanpages
    dir, dircolors, ls
    dpkg-name
    dvipdfm, dvips, dvitype

You can also check for usage of "extension" for man1 pages
starting with e-z (I recognized "ls" in passing through "dir"),
and then check sections other than 1 for additional "misuses"
of the word extension.

Or you could consider that maybe people use extension to mean a
suffix that denotes the contents of a file because that usage
is a useful concept, and few people care about the far less
important distinction of whether or not the extension's meaning
is enforced by the operating system.  In the rare cases where
extension enforcement is important, it can be explicitly noted.

I've sertainly been using "extension" to mean "suffix denoting
file content type" on Unix systems since the days before
VAXes existed.  The name probably came from TOP-10 (but it was
also used in some way on IBM's CP/CMS if I recall correctly,
so there may have been other origins), but the concept has
been useful on Unix all along.

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