Re: file types

At 11:01 PM 10/24/96 -0700, David Perrell wrote:

>All fine and dandy, except that to avoid the overhead of opening and
>reading a file to find out the type, the type must be part of the file
>system, not embedded in the file data. I know of no possible mechanism
>for this in the FAT system besides the extension and a single attribute
>byte. I believe the same is true of NTFS, though here you've got long
>filenames and support for UNICODE characters. 

I do not believe so. I could be wrong, but I think that NTFS has an
"extended attributes" feature like OS/2's HPFS. These can hold arbitrary (or
up to 64k) of meta-data.

>Can you imaging having to
>open tens of thousands of files to construct a readable
>folder/directory listing?

The smart thing to do would be to cache those file types somewhere.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 25 October 1996 06:13:58 UTC