682

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] dan@upvote.au 2 points 1 year ago

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/html for 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)

[-] dan@upvote.au 3 points 1 year ago

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.

this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023

682 points (97.8% liked)

Programmer Humor

32070 readers

400 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS