User level.
> performance. If this is not an option, and you insist on having fixed
> width records, we will have to come up with some extensions to the file
> format --- even though, that will either limit versatility or require
> us to accept special cased file-formats.
>
Right now, the networking files (usually) have some sort of header.
An extension could look like this:
[bytes]Foo1 Foo2 Foo3:
first line with actual data, starts at offset 'bytes'
second line with actual data, starts at offset 'bytes'*2
...
It should be trivial for a program which expects fixed-length headers to
parse the first line for the correct number of bytes and the names of the
header fields.
I assume that the total length of the field names in the header can be kept
below the length of the following records.
NB, one thing I doon't understand is that the IP addresses in the various
net files are printed in network byte order... not exactly human-readable,
IMHO.
-- Matthias Urlichs