Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> wrote:

From: "Olson, Arthur David" <OLSONA@dc37a.nci.nih.gov>

my guess is that the thing to do is put at the start of the file a count of the number of bytes worth of stamp that appear, then put the stamp information itself at the end of the file.

How would this work with the Unix `file' command?

Mr. Eggert's posting seems to confuse two independent improvements: a file magic number and a set of validity timestamps. Of course any "record offset" for the timestamps would come after the magic number. I agree with Mr. Olson that it would be better not to use up all the remaining uncommitted bytes in the record for timestamps, and that placing the offset to such a record elsewhere in the file would be better. Nathan