this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] victorz 59 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Thank God they went with file name extensions so we didn't have to preface every source .txt file with header content to instruct the editor about what kind of content it would have.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Why do I need to put that at the start of bash, desktop, and html files then?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

For shell scripts it's because bash isn't the only shell; if you leave out the shebang line, Ubuntu will run your script in Dash instead

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

For HTML, it’s to distinguish “standards mode” HTML from “quirks mode” HTML (which doesn’t need a header).

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because both ways are used. Microsoft relies on file names, linux on the first bytes of the file.

[–] p_consti 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not quite correct. For html, that is to signal standard compliance, you can leave it away and the browser will still handle it. For the bash one, all (most) shell scripts use .sh, so you need to give a shebang to tell the loader which executable (sh, bash, zsh, csh, ...) to use

Also on Linux xdg does take file extensions into account, just executables do not

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

You're right, my comment was oversimplified.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nothing unless you want to serve them without some other way to see what file type they are.

You can run bash scripts with bash.

Don't know what a desktop file is.

HTML has that because webservers used to not have auto media type detection and response headers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

.desktop files are a Linux/Unix thing. Basically, it's a fancy shortcut, usually to an application, which allows specifying additional infos, like e.g. translated names.
In particular, the contents of the application menu are defined by just a folder filled with .desktop files.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcut_(computing)#Unix