v05i028: /etc/magic lines for compress

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Fri Nov 18 03:44:23 AEST 1988


>Not only is this better,

This assertion has now been made twice.  I have yet to see any evidence
for its truth.  The strings in "/etc/magic" correspond, in at least the
two cases I cited (compressed files and packed files), to C-language
strings; could somebody please explain why expressing them as numbers in
a standard byte order, rather than as the strings they are, is somehow
"better"?



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