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

[Howard Gibson]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:56:21 +0000
"Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Unfortunately, Nautilus wound up designed (not surprisingly, when
> written by Mac folk who expected a "magic number" on their former
> platform) to depend on suffix information to identify stuff.
> 
> I was unhappy with this, and expressed opinion, at the time.
> 
> As you have observed, /etc/magic can be used to provide signatures to
> identify stuff, generally with a LOT more accuracy than file
> extensions ever offered.
> 
> Unfortunately, that accuracy comes at a cost:  You have to read
> roughly the first 500 bytes of each file in order to match it against
> /etc/magic.  Which, for a directory with a large number of entries,
> means a lot of I/O.  That was why the Nautilus maintainers declined to
> use /etc/magic by default :-(.

Christopher,

   Humungous directories are bad practise anyway!

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson-MwcKTmeKVNQ at public.gmane.org
howardg-PadmjKOQAFn3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org 
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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