Re: Magic is useless!

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 07Jan2002 11:13PM (+0800), James Henstridge wrote:
>
> Is it just me, or do file extensions and mime types stored in the 
> filesystem as metadata seem equivalent?  Both move with the file in the 
> filesystem (provided the app/user doesn't decide to change them), and 
> won't be available if just reading from a bytestream (in which case you 
> will need to get the information some other way, such as file magic).
> 
> The benefit of file extensions is that they are maintained over almost 
> every file system type.
 
The disadvantage of file extensions is that they limit what the user
can name the file, and break if the user renames the file in an
unapproved way. There are certainly tradeoffs here.

 - Maciej