On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 01:47:08PM +0100, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> > The small one is that it might be nice to include the output of `file` on
> > each file.
> The `file` output would need to be store with `file` version, since its
> output is not stable in my experience.
Yeah, that's kind of unfortunate. The man page says:
The type printed will usually contain one of the words _text_ (the
file contains only printing characters and a few common control
characters and is probably safe to read on an ASCII terminal),
_executable_ (the file contains the result of compiling a program
in a form understandable to some UNIX kernel or another), or
_data_ meaning anything else (data is usually “binary” or
non-printable). Exceptions are well-known file formats (core
files, tar archives) that are known to contain binary data. When
modifying magic files or the program itself, make sure to preserve
these keywords. Users depend on knowing that all the readable
files in a directory have the word “text” printed. Don't do as
Berkeley did and change “shell commands text” to “shell script”.
I'm not sure how stable the "well-known file formats" list is.
Maybe we could pick to standardize on whatever version is in RHEL7 and keep
that until RHEL7 EOL? That should give us a nice long timeframe.
Alternately, we could accept that the strings might change slightly and not
worry too much. We might need to special-case some things, too -- by
default, it prints the target of symbolic links, for example.
--
Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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