Indeed, the UNIX way file naming is extension-less short names, relying on magic numbers, file content, shebangs, file permissions and the path (files in /usr/man/* are probably man pages) to guess the file type. But when those meta-information are not available, like when moving files between systems or downloading them, file extensions come in handy.

I keep my documents and plain text files extensionless. And when I need to move files around, most of the times I do this visually and interactively rather than statically via shell globing (I use a script I made that opens vim with all files listed, each one in a line, and then I do renaming or moving via the editor). But probably I will give this idea up when I need to write some script. Adding a .txt file doesn't hurt and is way better than using file(1) or find(1) to select files by type.

(12-11-2020, 04:36 PM)zge Wrote: The problem is that the Unix filesystem doesn't embed file-types (or miscellaneous file attributes), creating the need for stuff like magic bytes or file extentions. I'd imagine it would be better if you could extend a glob with something like "*:type=exec" or "summer_1025*:type=image/*".

Haiku solves this problem by adding metadata to their database-based filesystem, file types are just a "column" for the file in the database. I don't know how this can be used on the command line, like globing. A database/metadata-based filesystem would be nice and solve problems like those as well.