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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to OSs that use an invisible execute bit?

Not really relevant to the discussion.

But I do personally agree, that better extensions (e.g. for exec files) in Linux would be a really good thing. I have the same gripe with Linux's case sensitivity of files and dirs. Fine if you want to make the file name more legible by using CamelCase or something, and this needs to be displayed as such. But it's madness that one directory can have the files with the same exact name (case written notwithstanding).

Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS. Not saying that we should bring it back or anything.

Of course it is relevant. It's not like other OSs make it more visible: the x bit is invisible. Bashing Windows for making it invisible without an alternative is just populist point scoring on HN. I guess the x bit is less likely to be transferred over BitTorrent although it wouldn't surprise me if there was some extension for it like there is for ZIP files. (BEP 0047 seems to cover the x bit).

It is not relevant because we are not talking about the bad original CORE DESIGN choice (and in here I agreed with you regarding Unix), but about the willful choice to keep a terrible SETTING TOGGLE. The latter you can change, the former have to live with. Bad design in one OS should not be an excuse to keep bad settings on in another OS. One has nothing to do with another, like I said.

You accused them of "willful support of criminals" by hiding the extension that makes it executable. To me that is only justified if there was a common practice of showing it, and Microsoft then hid it for some reason. If everyone else is also hiding it there is NO REASON to treat it as "willful support of criminals". In fact they would be superior to the competition in that you could set it to visible if you wanted to.

Macs, Unix/Linux, Beos - they do not depend on extension alone to determine the type of the file.

Windows does. The file extension determines everything (and the icons can be easily faked) and not showing it is criminal.

This is like MS brings a real pistol to a kindergarten and don't want to put it in a holster. You are the one, who tries to shift the blame and is asking why others are not holsting their weapons. They are not doing it because they don't bring weapons at all, or if they bring, they are orange toy weapons.

> Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS.

That must have been the conventions of some third-party file manager (Norton Commander?), because DOS stored and showed everything as uppercase, both directories and files.

My memory might have failed me.

But I did mostly use Dos Navigator.

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