[TriLUG] File extensions: OK, I understand now

[Ritesh Kumar]

On Dec 12, 2007 2:15 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> OK, I get it now. No file extension. My executable will simply be
> called "fpick". I'm changing my Makefile as we speak.
>
> Thanks for all of your quick input. Some was deadly serious, some was more
> humorous (Hi Alan), but all of you overwhelmingly opined there should be
> no
> extension.
>
> I cut my teeth on the PDP 11 and PC-DOS where extensions were actually
> important, so perhaps I have some predjudices from that early work. If
> this
> were just for myself, I'd probably use the .exe just to humor myself, but
> because this is free software available on the net, I'll follow universal
> convention and not use a file extension.
>

Hi Steve,
    On Linux, any executable will always have its "execute permission" bits
on. If you do an ls -lh <file> you will see the permission (x) bits there.
This is a very easy way to identify which files are executables.
    Also, the ls command supports options --color and -F to display hints (a
color (default green) and a * after the name of the file respectively if the
file is an executable).
    I have seen extensions being used for executable scripts quite often.
For shell scripts its .sh. For perl its .pl, for python its .py and so on.
In case your main program is a script which calls a native executable and an
extension is not desired in the name of the script, it is fairly common to
see the extension .bin on the native executable file. .bin is also used with
almost any self installing executable you download from the internet (java,
openoffice, firefox). The UT2004 game on linux has a launcher script called
ut2004 and the corresponding binary called ut2004.bin.

Hope that helps,
Ritesh


> Thanks
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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