AT&T UNIX™PC Unix System V Users Manual - tenox

ADF ( 4) (AT&T UNIX PC only ) ADF ( 4)
NAME
adf - application data format
DESCRIPTION
The Application Data Format (ADF) is a file format designed to
support data interchange between different applications. ADF is
an ASCII format with predefined keywords and tokens .
ADF consists of five basic data types: file operations, text,
numeric, graphic, and spreadsheet, along with their subtypes.
In addition to the basic data types, there are higher order data
types, such as tuples, tables, and groups, which are collections
of basic data types.
Each data type starts with a keyword, which is followed by a
number of arguments depending on the keyword. Each keyword
always appears at the beginning of a line, and is always terminated
with white space (ASCII tab or space) or a new line character.
All keywords accept either type of terminator. White
space at the beginning of the line is ignored.
In some cases, the arguments of keywords are also keyed, and in
this case the reserved words are used to introduce argument values
which are referred to as tokens . Tokens always appear at the
beginning of the line, and are terminated with white space or new
line characters.
Keywords that are followed by arguments of indefinite length or
number use braces to delimit the arguments that belong to the
keyword. These braces may be nested, and the matching end
brace terminates the keyword definition.
Any line beginning with the pound sign (#) character is ignored.
In this way comments may be embedded in an ADF file. An
exception to this rule is in the text data type, where a pound sign
may end up at the beginning of a line.
All lines are required to be less than 80 characters in length.
The ADF file begins with the ADF keyword, which identifies it as
an ADF file, followed by the VERSION keyword and the APPLI­
CATION keyword. The initial version of ADF is VERSION 1.0.
The APPLICATION keyword identifies the source of the ADF file.
Following this header are an arbitrary number of data items, and
the file ends with the EOF keyword.
File Operations
ADF supports the moving and copying of entire files and file folders.
The FILOP data type has the following format:
FILOP {
SOURCE
NAME
SOURCE
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