Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
These rules agree on "foo", "foo." and "foo.tar.gz", yet disagree on "foo.bar."; I don't know which is more natural.
Filename extensions come from DOS 8.3 format. In these kind of names only one '.' is allowed. Unix does not have filename extensions, as '.' is just a normal filename character (with the exception of '.', '..', and filenames starting with a '.' which are hidden files). As far as I know unix utilities like gzip look for specific extensions like '.gz', so it would make more sense on a unix platform to just look for a filename ending '.gz'... this applies recursively so: fred.tar.gz Is a tarred gzip file, so first ending is '.gz' the next is '.tar'... So as far as unix is concerned: "foo.bar." is just as it is... as would any other combination unless the extension matches that specifically used by your application... So the most sensible approach would be to have a list of known extensions which can be recursively applied to the filenames, and leave any other filenames alone. [".gz",".tar",".zip"] ... In other words just splitting on a '.' seems the wrong operation. (Imagine gziping a file called "a..." you get "a....gz", in other words simply an appended ".gz") Keean