this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.
Those sound fancy, I just use renamed txt files.
Amateurs.
I have evolved from using file extensions, and instead, don't use any extension!
I don’t even use a file system on my storage drives. I just write the file contents raw and try to memorize where.
Sounds tedious, I've just been keeping everything in memory so I don't have to worry about where it is.
Sounds inefficient. You can only store 8 gigs and goes away when you shut off your computer? I just put it on punch cards and feed it into my machine.
So archaic. Real men just flap a butterfly's wings so that they deflect in cosmic rays in such a way that they flip the desired bits in RAM.
As yes good old M-x-Butterfly.
I use mime. Because magic bit.
Linux mostly doesn't use file extensions... It relies on "magic bytes" in the file.
Same with the web in general - it relies purely on MIME type (e.g.
text/htmlfor HTML files) and doesn't care about extensions at all."Magic bytes"? We just called them headers, back in my day (even if sometimes they are at the end of the file)
The library that handles it is literally called "libmagic". I'd guess the phrase "magic bytes" comes from the programming concept of a magic number?
I did not know about that one! It makes sense though, because a lot of headers would start with, well yeah, "magic numbers". Makes sense.
You can just go in Folder View and uncheck "hide known file extensions" to fix that! ;)
SQLite explicitly encourages using it as an on-disk binary format. The format is well-documented and well-supported, backwards compatible (there's been no major version changes since 2004), and the developers have promised to support it at least until the year 2050. It has quick seek times if your data is properly indexed, the SQLite library is distributed as a single C file that you can embed directly into your app, and it's probably the most tested library in the world, with something like 500x more test code than library code.
Unless you're a developer that really understands the intricacies of designing a binary data storage format, it's usually far better to just use SQLite.
Use binwalk on those
Most of Adobe’s formats are just gzipped XML
Microsoft office also is xml