🚀 go-pugleaf

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