There are 3 types of files. Renamed txt, renamed zip, and exe
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I'd argue with this, but it seems like image and video file extensions have become a lawless zone with no rules so I don't even think they count.
Looking at you, .webp
Video files are just a bunch of zip files in a trenchcoat.
Back in the day, when bandwidth was precious and porn sites would parcel a video into 10 second extracts, one per page, you could zip a bunch of these mpeg files together into an uncompressed zip, then rename it .mpeg and read it in VLC as a single video. Amazing stuff.
What's it called when you logically expect something to work, but are totally surprised that it actually does?
Sounds an awful lot like a normal day at work as a dev.
Don't forget renamed tar.
It's a folder that you put files into, but acts as a file itself. Not at all like zip.
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Ah, good ol' Microsoft Office. Taken advantage of their documents being a renamed .zip format to send forbidden attachments to myself via email lol
On the flip side, there's stuff like the Audacity app, that saves each audio project as an SQLite database 😳
Also .jar files. And good ol' winamp skins. And CBZ comics. And EPUB books. And Mozilla extensions. And APK apps. And...
an SQLite database
Genius! Why bother importing and exporting
Minetest (an open-source Minecraft-like game) uses SQLite to save worlds.
Mineclone2 is an absolute masterpiece of a game for Minetest IMO
I prefer games that embrace the difference from Minecraft instead of trying to emulate it. My favorite is MeseCraft.
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SQLite is amazing. Shush.
that saves each audio project as an SQLite database 😳
Is this a problem? I thought this would be a normal use case for SQLite.
doesn't sqlite explicitly encourage this? I recall claims about storing blobs in a sqlite db having better performance than trying to do your own file operations
Thanks for the hint. I had to look that up. (The linked page is worth a read and has lots of details and caveats.)
The scope is narrow, and well documented. Be very wary of over generalizing.
The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05 using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0. You may expect future versions of SQLite to perform even better.
https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html
SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().
Furthermore, a single SQLite database holding 10-kilobyte blobs uses about 20% less disk space than storing the blobs in individual files.)
Edit 5: consolidated my edits.
wait what
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Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.
Those sound fancy, I just use renamed txt files.
.ini is that you?
Amateurs.
I have evolved from using file extensions, and instead, don't use any extension!
I don’t even use a file system on my storage drives. I just write the file contents raw and try to memorize where.
Sounds tedious, I've just been keeping everything in memory so I don't have to worry about where it is.
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SQLite explicitly encourages using it as an on-disk binary format. The format is well-documented and well-supported, backwards compatible (there's been no major version changes since 2004), and the developers have promised to support it at least until the year 2050. It has quick seek times if your data is properly indexed, the SQLite library is distributed as a single C file that you can embed directly into your app, and it's probably the most tested library in the world, with something like 500x more test code than library code.
Unless you're a developer that really understands the intricacies of designing a binary data storage format, it's usually far better to just use SQLite.
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Nothing wrong with that... Most people don't need to reinvent the wheel, and choosing a filename extension meaningful to the particular use case is better then leaving it as .zip or .db or whatever.
Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.
Plus often we're talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I've written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.
When i discovered as a little kid that apk files are actually zips i felt like a detective.
Wait till you meet the real evil...
WEBP images. The worst image file format on earth to deal with metadata and timestamps. FFFFUUUUUCK WEBPOOP (and no AVIF please).
XNViewMP is a saviour on all OSes though, thankfully, being the only tool that can batch convert webpoops to any proper image format with preserved metadata.
Atleast with renamed ZIP files, I literally do not need to care as long as 7-Zip or PeaZip is installed, so I can just "open as * archive". And for video/audio, have MediaInfo installed on any OS. You will thank me someday.
I'm curious, what's wrong with webp?
WEBP is very weird to convert to other formats and retain metadata. This is not a problem with JPG, PNG and other formats. And only one tool I mentioned solves that problem.
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Smh at least use 7z
zstd or leave
They both have their use cases. Zstandard is for compression of a stream of data (or a single file), while 7-Zip is actually two parts: A directory structure (like tar) plus a compression algorithm (like LZMA which it uses by default) in a single app.
7-Zip is actually adding zstd support: https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/feature-requests/1580/
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I'll gunzip you to oblivion!
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