Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: Notesfiles $Revision: 1.7.0.8 $; site ccvaxa Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!dual!qantel!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece From: preece@ccvaxa.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: more on file \"attributes\" Message-ID: <2000018@ccvaxa> Date: Tue, 6-Aug-85 11:04:00 EDT Article-I.D.: ccvaxa.2000018 Posted: Tue Aug 6 11:04:00 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 12-Aug-85 04:19:13 EDT References: <3398@decwrl.UUCP> Lines: 39 Nf-ID: #R:decwrl.UUCP:-339800:ccvaxa:2000018:000:1927 Nf-From: ccvaxa.UUCP!preece Aug 6 10:04:00 1985 > There seems to be no easy answer. I stand firm with those, however, > who say don't tamper with the Unix way of storing files. At least > 99.99% of all the programs running on Unix machines will be "c" > programs, which don't need the overhead of having to account for the > special "fortran" stuff whenever they process files. (Sorry, pascal > and lisp programmers, I should lump you in with the "c" people.) ---------- If you really think that 99.99% of all the programs running on Unix machines will be "c" programs, you haven't dealt with the real world. There are many, many, MANY sites out there that use almost all their CPU time running things like SPICE and SPSS and a myriad of other existing engineering, statistical, and scientific applications written in (gasp) FORTRAN. As to where header information should go, I agree that there's no easy answer. Putting it outside the file seems preferable to me, because I think files should be homogeneous and because I hate to think about random access needing to work around the header and because I like making it truly invisible to uninformed processes. This doesn't violate "the Unix way of storing files" any more than the other out-of-band information already kept about files. Certain basic tools need to know about it (like dump/restore), others simply lose the data (like sort). If a vendor chose to add this feature (or if the standards committee chose to add it), either the existing commands would grow switches to recognize the header data or new commands would be added. No big deal. I kind of like the idea of a LISP-ish property list (or you could think of it as a file environment, if you like) in which any arbitrary (name, value) pairs could be stuck. Then a getfileproperty call would get a particular value. The first rule, of course, has to be to not break existing Unix. -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece