Re: Incoming mail and on-the-fly compression

[Stephen Peters <speters%samsun@us.oracle.com>]

Mark Borges <mdb@cdc.noaa.gov> writes:

> >> On 19 May 1996 21:16:45 -0400,
> >> Richard Pieri(rp) wrote:
> >>>>>> "LMI" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:
> 
> LMI> I didn't know that `make-temp-name' creates names like that.  What
> LMI> system is this on?
> 
> rp> Sparc Sun Solaris 2.5, XEmacs 19.13, Gnus 5.0.15.
> 
> Sparc Sun Solaris 2.5, XEmacs 19.14, sgnus-0.89
> 
> doesn't:
> 
>   (make-temp-name "foo") ==> "fooa005QB"

Actually, it probably does.

Because make-temp-name uses the mktemp() function (in Emacs 19, and I
would assume in XEmacs as well), this is kind of system-specific.  On
Solaris 2.5, it appears that the set of characters used for those last
6 positions can include both the period (.) and the underscore (_)
characters as well as the alphanumeric characters (bringing the number
of characters used to 64 -- probably for efficiency considerations).
On the other hand, the GNU C library only uses letters and digits in
its implementation.  I will leave the behavior of other systems as an
exercise for the reader.

In short, on some machines it's quite possible to see temp files
ending in ".Z" or ".gz", or even any other special one- or
two-character extension.

-- 
Stephen L. Peters                         speters%samsun@us.oracle.com
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