the .exe extension

[Thomas Wolff]

On 12.03.2010 16:16, Eric Blake wrote:
>> ...
>>      
> This is an area of active conversation; if you would like, you can test
> the latest snapshot and the experimental coreutils 8.4-1 to see if the
> behavior is more intuitive (that is, there are more situations where
> .exe is preserved across file moves or copies, and fewer places where
> .exe is appended on a whim if the source didn't have one).
>
> In general, cygwin does not care if the .exe is missing, but other
> programs (particularly cmd) do, so it is better if PE-COFF files are
> given the .exe extension.  But implementing it is tricky - for example,
> in the case of 'cat a>  b', there is no way to tell at the time when b
> is created whether it will be populated with PE-COFF contents (that is,
> no way to tell whether the source was a literal 'a' or 'a.exe'), so you
> will not get an .exe in that case.
>    
I'm just pondering the bold idea (probably to be discarded) that it 
*could* be detected by "magic number" checking, i.e. renaming a new file 
on-the-fly after a few bytes of PE-COFF have been written to its 
beginning... 8-)
------
Thomas

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