Andrew Thompson wrote:
> When it comes to the JMF PP, it is normally supplied in
> an .EXE for Win., which I am guessing installs DLL's, and
> for the Unix/Linux boxes, there is a .BIN file.
>
> Am I correct in my (wild ass) guess that the crude
> equivalence might be expressed as..
> *nix | .BIN - when run might install .SO
> Win. | .EXE - when run might install .DLL
> ?
Unix is case sensitive. So it is .bin and .so, not .BIN or .SO
..bin has no real meaning on Unix. File extensions don't define if
something can be executed or not, file attributes do. That makes some
people (Windows developers) so nervous that they slap made-up
extensions like .bin onto something which should be executable. If an
executable on Unix has an extension, it typically identifies the
interpreter language and format used to write it. E.g. .sh: shell
script, .shar: self-extracting shell archive, .pl: perl, etc. It does
not identify if the file is executable.
..so is by convention the extension for a shared binary object. It
contains position-independent code (pic), so it is easily relocatable.
This makes it suitable for dynamic linking and loading. When loading,
code and read-only data is shared between several processes.
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