Talk:Unix file types

What's a mode string?

This page mentioned "mode string" for several times. What's a mode string? Yegle (talk) 18:11, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

At the time of this writing, mode string are explained at Unix_file_types#Mode string. And at File system permissions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.246.139.246 (talk) 23:54, 23 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What does this first sentence mean?

What does this first sentence mean? Being the well known entity files are, files are also called "regular files" to ... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2606:6000:6042:6A00:6C2F:37B:43D5:28F4 (talk) 21:23, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge of Modes (Unix) into Unix file types

Both parts of "mode" as defined in the stat member is covered by this article. The representation is redundant with File system permissions#Traditional Unix permissions Artoria 2e5 🌉 12:49, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Artoria2e5: You proposed the merge at 12:49, 29 June 2020, and then two minutes later (at 12:51) you redirected the page to Unix file types#Representations. That hardly allowed any time for discussion.

You missed the earlier discussion at Talk:Modes (Unix)#Should this redirect to chmod? wbm1058 (talk) 01:14, 26 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

wbm1058, apologies for the fast merge. I happened to decide on writing something about representation with sources, and it then occured to me that it already subsumes the mode thing. Mode being unreferenced, I thought nobody is gonna miss it. --Artoria 2e5 🌉 04:40, 26 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What does "Unix-based" mean?

This article uses the term "Unix-based" twice in the lead. What does it mean?

If it means "based on AT&T's Unix implementation", then it doesn't include, for example, most Linux distributions, with an independently-developed kernel and independently-developed userland software, even though Linux has the same notion of file types that AT&T Unix does, albeit perhaps with additional file types (just as systems based on the AT&T code have added file types).

If it means "Unix-compatible" or (mostly or totally) POSIX-compatible, that's pretty much the modern sense of Unix-like. (When I first heard the term, back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, it referred to reimplementations from scratch that may have had some incompatible API differences from Real Unix(TM). Those systems have largely either disappeared or removed the incompatibilities, and the term has pretty much come to mean systems such as Linux.)

The term is used in other articles as well; the same question applies there. Guy Harris (talk) 23:24, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the intention was "Unix-like", so I went ahead and changed it. The cited section in Unix Power Tools says Recent versions of Unix (such as Linux), which is obviously wrong, so we're freewheeling here ;) — W.andrea (talk) 02:27, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]