portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) (08/14/89)
This seems pretty obvious, but it would be nice if some way was provided for WB to determine if the executable it is about to run is a CLI-only command, and put up a warning requester telling the user "This tool may not be used from Workbench." Or, perhaps the requester could prompt for command arguments (assuming it is a CLI command) and start it up as a CLI command with I/O streams directed to a console window. Either option is preferable to what happens now, which is to blindly start up the program and hope it doesn't crash the system from lack of stdin/stdout. This feature becomes especially important if the 1.4 WB allows the user to see files for which no .info files exist. A good (and probably the only workable) heuristic to determine if something is a CLI-only executable is whether a .info file exists for it or not. If the 1.4 Workbench contains a feature for creating .info files for executables without icons, perhaps it can set a "magic bit" to indicate that the icon was generated by Workbench and that the program beneath it may well not be a Workbench-compatible application. Finally, why was ".info" chosen as the extension for Workbench icon files? ".icon" would have been less appropriate (since a .info file contains more than an icon definition), but would have clashed less with those of us who like to name text files with the .info extension (as I sometimes do). --M -- Michael Portuesi Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc. portuesi@SGI.COM