"File types"

[Doc Shipley]

der Mouse wrote:
>>>Unix was the first system that I'd ever seen where the file name
>>>implied a type.
> 
> 
> I don't think Unix file names imply types, though for some types they
> do imply default types.  (Or, to put it another way, they imply types
> in an advisory, not mandatory, sense.)

<snip>

> This does not describe any even vaguely Unixish system in my
> experience.  All of them handle such things just fine - indeed, I have
> a number of plain text documentation files named something.doc on my
> home machines.

   Some builds of GNU gzip will indeed hurl on a file not named to its 
taste.  Note that I'm *not* disagreeing with you.  As far as I'm 
concerned that behavior breaks all kinds of conventions.  But it is a fact.


	Doc