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From: tim@cithep.UucP (Tim Smith )
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.unix
Subject: Re: unix file system
Message-ID: <95@cithep.UucP>
Date: Mon, 29-Jul-85 00:07:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: cithep.95
Posted: Mon Jul 29 00:07:11 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 21:09:56 EDT
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Organization: Caltech HEP, Pasadena, CA
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This is not really relevent, but I have sometimes thought that instead of
offsets in a file starting at zero, they should start at some negative
number, possibly specified in the inode.  When you open the file you start
at zero.  The only way to get the data before zero would be an explicit seek.

This "negative region" could be used for things like the a.out header for
executable files, the #!/bin/sh for shell scripts ( note that there is no
need for the prog to recognize # as a comment character ), or information
on record sizes for files that were brought from another system or produced
by a record oriented language ( although it would still be up to user mode
code to actually interpret this; let's leave the kernel out of this. ).
-- 
					Tim Smith
				ihnp4!{wlbr!callan,cithep}!tim