15 Mar
2007
15 Mar
'07
9:54 p.m.
Although the UNIX purist might argue that all is
bytes, in reality
for many folks, they routinely deal with known file types created by
a relatively few applications.
Certainly. But that's a long way from expecting cat(1) to recognize
the headers on mpeg files and convert two header+data mpegs into
header+data+data instead of header+data+header+data.
Especially given the chance of misfires, with cat curdling data that
happens to look a little bit too much like sokme format it knows but
isn't.
If you want to make basic tools like cat(1) smart about file types, you
really need out-of-band file types, which Unix simply doesn't have.
(Such a thing could be layered atop Unix, but the result wouldn't be
very much like Unix any longer.)
You might as well argue that you don't like
standard filename
extensions becaues filenames are just bytes.
If they're advisory, I think they're a good thing. If they're
compulsory, I think they're a very bad thing.
Just like file types in headers.
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