Re: UNIX/Linux text files
Incoming from Dragan Cvetkovic:
> Adam Funk <a24061@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > On Tuesday 20 April 2004 16:50, John Hasler wrote:
> >
> >> Ciaran writes:
> >>> The file command uses magic to figure it out. Is that any better?
> >>
> >> The point is that there are no "text files": just files that happen to
> >> contain text. This not true of all operating systems.
> >
> > You mean the traditional Mac system, with resource and data forks in
> > each file?
>
> Or VMS or MVS or CP/M or lot of other operating systems. If I still
> remember correctly (it's been a while), on VMS you can specify if file is
> text or record based and also the access to it (sequential, random etc).
Last I looked, VMS had multiple types of text files, all stemming from
its heavily hacked IO performance routines. I vaguely remember ther
were about 16 of them. Run away!
--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling
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