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- From: gsf@ulysses.att.com (Glenn S. Fowler)
- Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
- Subject: Re: Improving "file" (was Re: Making Solaris 2.1 smarter...)
- Message-ID: <1993Jan10.143907.12860@ulysses.att.com>
- Date: 10 Jan 93 14:39:07 GMT
- References: <16235@auspex-gw.auspex.com> <C0Hoqv.GtJ@vuse.vanderbilt.edu> <16320@auspex-gw.auspex.com>
- Distribution: na
- Organization: AT&T Bell Labs
- Lines: 33
-
- In article <16320@auspex-gw.auspex.com> guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
- >>I'm just learning to use perl and wonder if anyone else thinks that perl
- >>would be a good implementation language for the extended file(1) that
- >>Guy describes.
- >
- >Actually, at this point, most of it is already implemented in another
- >language, namely C; Ian Darwin's "file", version 3.0, has much of what's
- >needed, and I sent him a pile of changes that add in some missing stuff:
- >
- > I added "beshort" and company, although it still does C-style
- > strings for "string";
-
- instead of changing the magic file format to handle BE/LE, change the
- file command to test, for each short/long initial entry, both BE and
- LE orderings, and then stick with the ordering for that entry
-
- our local file does this and successfully handles all of the magic
- formats on the cross-mounted files for our local architectures
- (sun,vax,mipsel,mipseb,i386,dynix,3b,hp,etc.)
-
- by having one file (and one magic file) we get the same output for
- a given set of input files no matter what host file runs on and we
- avoid the magic file duplication that would be required with
- short-beshort-leshort and long-belong-lelong
-
- of course there is a possibility of BE/LE clash or diff architectures
- with diff meaning for the same magic, but we haven't hit this yet
-
- Glenn Fowler (908)-582-2195 AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
- uucp: {att,ucbvax}!ulysses!gsf internet: gsf@ulysses.att.com
-
- Glenn Fowler (908)-582-2195 AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
- uucp: {att,ucbvax}!ulysses!gsf internet: gsf@ulysses.att.com
-