🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16235@auspex-gw.auspex.com> guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>"file" probably should have some way of saying something like
>
>	0	pattern		%! PS-Adobe-*	PostScript document, version %s
>	0	string		%!		PostScript document
>
>It should probably *also* have keywords such as "beshort", "belong",
>"leshort", and "lelong", to extract a multi-byte number in a *fixed*
>byte order, rather than in the machine's *native* byte order.
>
>It should probably also remove the backslash escapes from "string", and
>have a "cstring" type for strings that *do* include the backslash
>escapes, unless AT&T picked up the backslash escapes in SVR4; otherwise,
>the Solaris 2.x "file" is incompatible with the "file" in other SVR4's,
>because the SVR4 one would have an entry
>
>	0	string		\begindata	Andrew Toolkit document
>
>for Andrew Toolkit documents, while the SunOS 4.x and 5.x one would have
>an entry
>
>	0	string		\\begindata	Andrew Toolkit document
>
>Oh, yes, and USL should pick up *all* of the above, including "cstring",
>*and* should pick up the bit-field extracting stuff from the SunOS
>"file", *and* should pick up the damn man page for the magic file format
>- they're all clear wins.  ("Documenting" the format only with that
>quick-and-dirty comment in the beginning of "/etc/magic" is just
>ridiculous.)

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.
-- 
David R. Linn, System/Mail/News Manager	| INET: drl@vuse.vanderbilt.edu
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