Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
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From: alexande@borland.com (Mark Alexander)
Subject: Re: RCS 5.5 for MS-DOS and OS/2
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.191643.27412@borland.com>
Organization: Borland International
References: <1991Mar15.075234.17433@gupta.portal.com> <68410004@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com> <1991Mar22.080547.5576@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1991 19:16:43 GMT

In article <1991Mar22.080547.5576@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE> rommel@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Kai-Uwe Rommel) writes:
>Problems arise when you want to specify both the source file name and
>the RCS file name on the command line. The RCS programs would then have
>difficultites to determine which of the files the RCS file is and which
>the source file. Some programs that work on top of RCS use this.

One possibility is that RCS could read the first four bytes of the
file in question.  If they are "head" the file is probably an RCS
file.  It sounds terrible, but I had to do this in an MS-DOS port of
RCS 4 to allow users to keep their RCS files in arbitrary directories.
It's pretty unlikely for an ordinary text file to start with "head".