On 6/14/10, Ethan Grammatikidis <eeke...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > > On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:28, Antoni Grzymala wrote: > >> Bjartur Thorlacius dixit (2010-06-14, 23:24): >> >>> On 6/14/10, Matthew Bauer <mjbaue...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> I wish modern filesystems would allow some way of identifying a >>>> file type >>>> besides in the filename. It seems like that would make things more >>>> straight >>>> forward. >> >>> Surely many modern filesystem support xattrs (extended file >>> attributes)? >>> One should be able to use them to store media types. > > Should, or will? WDYM? AFAIK ext4, Reiserfs, ZFS (if that's categorized as a FS), btrfs and others support xattr /if/ properly configured. OTOH I think they're disabled by default on many distros. Any examples of filesystems that don't support them besides NFS? > I get the impression storing file type information was much more > common in the past, which raises the question why is it not now? I > think it's pointless because most file types can be identified from > their first few bytes. This loops back around to my content-type > argument, why should the server go looking for file type when the > client gets it handed to it anyway? Not all media types contain magic numbers. In theory one could just wrap all files in a metadata container that would allow for seperation of "static" metadatata about files seperately from transfer info (such as Date and Transfer-*), but that would require long transition period and standardization on a new Content-Encoding that may become default in, say, HTTP/2.0 and get some basic support in MS IE 11 or 12.
P.S. When I say "wrapper" I mean something like an shebang/PS style header like #=text/html. -- kv, - Bjartur
