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From: jack@boring.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.unix
Subject: Re: unix file system
Message-ID: <6556@boring.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 15:13:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.6556
Posted: Mon Aug  5 15:13:09 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Aug-85 00:38:23 EDT
References: <3287@decwrl.UUCP> <95@ucbcad.UUCP> <95@cithep.UucP>
Reply-To: jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
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In article <95@cithep.UucP> tim@cithep.UucP (Tim Smith ) writes:
>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


This looks better than a special 'file attribute', since you don't
need funny system calls, etc, but it still has the problem
that you have to re-write almost any unix-utility in existence.

If I do 'cp a.out foobar', I would prefer the header to be copied
too........
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@mcvax.UUCP
	The shell is my oyster.