On 12/12/11 5:23 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 12 December 2011 04:17, Alexander Schreiber<als
at thangorodrim.de> wrote:
On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 04:59:48PM +0000, Liam
Proven wrote:
On 8 December 2011 21:03, Dave McGuire<mcguire
at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 12/07/2011 08:14 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>
> I don't really understand why any techie dislikes it, TBH. It is
> /vastly/ easier than, say, learning to understand how Unix wildcards
> work, let alone regular expressions or something - both things which
> I've not yet mastered after more than 20y of effort.
UNIX shell wildcards? A question mark matches any single character, an
asterisk matches any number of any characters. What's so tough about that?
What is so tough is the way that the shell expands them, not the
command. I am assured this is wonderfully useful for many people but
for me it's a complete PITA. For instance, I frequently need to do
things like:
REN *.log *.old
... which works fine on DOS, Windows and most other OSs but doesn't
work on Unix/Linux.
Wrong tool.
If you want to do the above, use mmv:
mmv "*.log" "#1.old"
In general, because file extensions are a sort of
grafted-on
afterthought on Unix, I find it handles them very poorly, whereas they
Unix actually doesn't give a damn about so-called file extensions. As
far as Unix cares, ".log", ".png", ".whatever" is just a
part of the
filename. ...
Yes, I know. It's not that, I have no problem with that. The thing is
that in the<ironic>wonderful world of the Web</ironic>, extensions
are once again part of the deal - stuff like .html and .jpg and .png
and whatnot all suddenly become very significant, even if the server
and client are both Unix machines.
How does that show that representing extensions as part of a file name
string is problematic?
Extensions have 2 functions in Unix:
* aide-memoire for the user including a large set of conventions;
* (later) compatibility with legacy systems.
The representation that Unix uses is effective for these use cases. Can
you give an actual example of where Unix handles extensions "very
poorly"? (Your faux-DOS command doesn't seem to qualify, as it is
neither about Unix (rather, shell), nor a valid use of mv.)
In the case of the web, browsers are supposed to pay attention to
Content-Type, not sniff by extension. (Yes, I know Apache can be
configured to sniff extensions. Again, this works just fine with Unix'
representation.)
Plus, Unixes such as Mac OS X use extensions as
important metadata, as
must any Linux which interoperates with Windows - which is to say most
of them. Extensions are important to LibreOffice and so on, for
example.
Extensions are extensions. All the above is just interpretation. File
association is not rocket science (though it's been reinvented too many
times). The interesting exception is classic MacOS with its type/creator
codes independent of extension (and where extensions were initially
absent, though like Unix, supported as part of the file name).
--Toby
>> were and remain integral to DOS-based& Windows-based systems - i.e.
>> about 95% of the machines I support.
>>...