[Tutor] Creating typed files with Python, BeOS (OT)

[dman]

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On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 07:54:11AM -0400, Charlie Clark wrote:
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| Giving textfiles a ".txt" extension is purely a convention required for
| primitive file systems such as FAT/ NTFS or Posix. Removing or changing
| the extension can make such files unreadable on that system.

Just some clarification :

AFAIK there is no filesystem "Posix".  Instead there are several
implementations of a posix-style fs (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, ...).
These file systems don't care about so-called "extensions".  It really
isn't an extension, it's just part of the name ('.' is a legal
character in a name).  On UNIX systems the "extension" is only used by
a few programs, such as the C compiler or the python interpreter, but
otherwise is just a convention for human consumption.  On UNIX systems
a file is a file is a file.  It's up to the application do decide what
to do with the byte stream contained in it.

I *think* FAT32 and NTFS allow files without "extensions" (cygwin
seems capable of creating them), but many Windows applications don't
like that idea and don't provide a human interface for creating such
files.  Older MS-DOS filesystems more-or-less required an extension
(and there it _was_ an extension with the infamous 8.3 filename
limit), but the extension could be the empty string.

| Some file systems such as the BFS provide sophisticated file typing and
| Python can hook into this. Bear in mind that this is platform specific

I think MacOS has concept too, but I'm not sure about Darwin.

-D

--=20

Failure is not an option.  It is bundled with the software.
=20
GnuPG key : http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/public_key.gpg


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