Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On 2025-04-27, Bonita Montero <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> wrote:

Am 26.04.2025 um 17:00 schrieb Scott Lurndal:
>

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

>

In a "C" file (of the Kornshell software) I stumbled across this
comment: "Each command in the history file starts on an even byte
and is null-terminated."
I wonder what's the reason behind that even-byte-alignment, on "C"
level or on Unix/files level. Any ideas?

>

Possibly to support 16-bit character sets?

>
Unix has a big problem that it doesn't support 16 bit character sets.

16 bit encodings are junk; not supporting them doesn't cause an
issue whatsoever.

Win32 supported UCS-2 from the beginning and UTF-16 afaik since Windows
2000. With Unix there's even not a standard charset for the filesystem;
each filename character is just an octet.

What is the standard charset of a Windows file name?
Be sure your answer covers FAT32 and such.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca