Re: Capabilities

Kevin M. Bealer (kbealier@stny.lrun.com)
Sat, 22 May 1999 19:14:27 -0400

Bill Spitzak wrote:
...
>
>If in fact Linux goes with file-system capabilities, it seems to me
>that this means that information that is only useful for executable
>files is stored with *every* file (granted the likely implementation
>will take no space). This would seem to imply that we should look
>into a system where every file is executable. This would match the
>Windoze or Mac idea where you can double-click anything and
>(supposedly) it does something useful. Building the linking of what
>running a file does into the system (well, probably the exec call in
>the library) could make shell scripting much more powerful, and remove
>the need for incompatable and complex code in the UI.
>

In my experience, Windows doesn't really allow you to "execute" these
files from the command line, per se. You have a file manager (explorer)
which does a look up and determines which program to run on the file.
This would be easy to do for linux, but is not a kernel issue.

As for macintosh, I've never seen the command line interface, although
I assume there is some emergency mode somewhere that has a prompt, so
the GUI is the UI. It seemed to me (last time I used a Mac), that the
"resource forks" must have the executable name in them somewhere.
(Or maybe all of the data files start with "#!/bin/MacPaint" ......)

-----kbealier.at.stny.lrun.com-------------------------------------
Any sufficiently advanced operating system is indistinguishable from Un*x.

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