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From: Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com>
Message-Id: <199501272309.RAA22033@bonkers.taronga.com>
Subject: Re: Am I dreaming?
To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 17:09:43 -0600 (CST)
Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
In-Reply-To: <199501271800.KAA23617@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 27, 95 10:00:56 am
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> My question is, how hard would it be to make them MORE than informational?
> e.g. the system sees one of these URL specs as a filename and auto-fetches
> it for you.

Yow. Now *that* would be way cool. What would you do, have a mechanism to
register a program to be passed the URL if you open a symlink that matches
URL format?

(ooh, then you could do

	ln -s http://localhost/cgi-bin/executable?symlink+target file

though it'd be more fun to do

	ln -s sh:/usr/local/bin/... file
)

> I guess this all gets back to the whole `user mode translation of file names'
> thing we were talking about awhile back.  It's not the same as portals,
> which require a given mount point to be traversed, but rather affects all
> files who's names match some sort of selection criteria.  The feature above
> would be one very nice application for this.

I'd make it only in symlinks, and make the symlink match something more than
just a URL... (@proto://...?).