Proposed magic number patch

Chris Newman Chris.Newman at innosoft.com
Tue Oct 7 23:18:11 UTC 1997


On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, John Cowan wrote:
> The following patch adds a "magic number" to compiled zoneinfo
> files.  The affected files are zic.c and tzfile.h.  In essence,
> the first four bytes of zoneinfo files are set to
> "\0x14\0x1a\0x54\0x5a", which in ASCII is "^T^ZTZ".
> This patch is trivial, but will assist in the automatic
> recognition of zoneinfo files by the Unix "file" command.

Excellent idea, but I'd suggest choosing a magic number based on the
principles outlined in RFC 2083 section 12.11.  I propose:

\211 T Z \r \n ^Z \n

as a magic number.

		- Chris





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