[OT] File type on UNIX

[KennyTM~]

On Sep 18, 10 04:24, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
> KennyTM~ wrote:
>> On Sep 17, 10 02:26, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
[-snip-]
>>
>> This describes the file(1) command, which the job is to inspect the file
>> content and conclude what kind of file it actually is.
>>
> 	I suggest you re-read the paragraph I posted. Although it was taken
> from the "file" web site, it states clearly that other apps look at
> the file contents instead of the extension. Of course, some apps
> don't care about the file type but some do. And most of those that
> do care don't use the extension.
>

Many apps in Windows doesn't care about the file extension too. You can 
rename a bitmap to 'file.txt' and still can open it in MS Paint. This is 
irrelevant to UNIX.

>> But this is just one particular UNIX command. The command line interface
>> in general does not care about the type of a regular file. This is
>> needed in the GUI, but it is outside of the common parts of UNIX. There
>> is no rule saying that a file manager must use file(1) or MIME type or
>> extensions to determine the file type.
>>
> 	True, but then, there is no rule that says that on windows a file
> manager must use the extension. However, on Windows, all the file
> managers I've tried have used the extension (actually, most of the
> time they don't use the extension themselves, they simply ask
> Windows to open the file and Windows uses the extension), whereas on
> UNIX most file managers use the file contents (usually, they don't
> use the file command, but instead rely on libmagic directly) and
> most applications will ignore the extension when asked to open a
> file (OK, some Windows applications do that too but on *NIX most of
> them do).
>
> 		Jerome

Mac OS X is UNIX. Finder cares about the file extension (besides metadata).