5.2.4 The Global Flags Section

The file flags section occurs after the authorised-users list. Each file flag occurs on a separate line and are possibly followed by their values (except the boolean flags, whose mere presence is sufficient). These lines look like this:-

     ^Af f e 0
     ^Af f n
     ^Af f q Q-flag-value
     ^Af f v /bin/true

The ‘e’ flag, if set to a nonzero value, indicates that the controlled file is binary and is therefore stored in uuencoded form in the file body. If this flag is set to zero or is missing, then the file body is not encoded. See Flags for information about the other possible flag letters and their meanings. See Interoperability for information about sharing sccs files with other implementations of sccs.

The ‘e’ flag is a boolean flag but is stored within the sccs file with a value, as shown in the example above. When cssc initially writes the sccs file header for a new sccs fiel created with admin -i, it does not know if the initial body of the file is binary or not, so ‘^Af f e 0’ is written into the header and if the file turns out to need encoding, admin will seek back to the header and change ‘^Af f e 0’ to ‘^Af f e 1’. If binary file support is disabled (see Binary File Support, ‘^Af f e 0’ is still used but will never be changed to ‘^Af f e 1’.

The value for the ‘y’ flag is stored as a space-separated list of keyword letters, even though the letters were separated by commas when they were passed to admin -fy. This flag is an extension introduced by Sun Solaris 8. See Interoperability for a discussion of the interoperability of cssc with other sccs implementations.