[Info-vax] OT: Rob Short: Operating System Evolution

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 04-01-2010 18:44, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article<paul.nospam-91F9B0.21284204012010 at pbook.sture.ch>,
> 	Paul Sture<paul.nospam at sture.ch>  writes:
>> In article<4b40c08e$0$280$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
>>   Arne Vajhøj<arne at vajhoej.dk>  wrote:
>>
>>> The *nix and Win way is that extension implies content while VMS and
>>> to some extent DOS is that application implies content and extension
>>> usually can be omitted because the application will apply the default.
>>>
>>> I very much prefer the VMS way for command line, but it is
>>> not easily applied to GUI.
>>
>> One problem I find with OS X (and I assume other *nix variants) is
>> determining which files are executables or scripts.
>
> Try the "file" command.
>
>>                                                      The .EXE and .COM
>> convention used by VMS does makes that easy to see at a glance.
>
> I thought we were just told that under VMS there is no significance to
> file name extensions?  I know I had no problem running a file with the
> extension .ZIP this morning.

It is very rare that the extension impacts functionality.

The difference is that on VMS various tools applies a default
extension while on *nix & win the tools use the extension to determine
what to do.

With VMS C $ CC FOOBAR means the same as $ CC FOOBAR.C, while with a
*nix gcc foobar.c the extension is used to determine what to do with
the file (gcc foobar.s or gcc foobar.o does something different).

Arne