FACE(6) FACE(6)
NAME
face - face files
DESCRIPTION
The directories /usr/$user/lib/face and /lib/face contain a
hierarchy of images of people. In those directories are
subdirectories named by the sizes of the corresponding image
files: 48x48x1 (48 by 48 pixels, one bit per pixel); 48x48x2
(48 by 48 pixels, two (grey) bits per pixel); 48x48x4 (48 by
48 pixels, four (grey) bits per pixel); 48x48x8 (48 by 48
pixels, eight (color-mapped) bits per pixel); 512x512x8 (512
by 512 pixels, eight (color-mapped) bits per pixel);
512x512x24 (512 by 512 pixels, twenty-four bits per pixel (3
times 8 bits per color)). The large files serve no special
purpose; they are stored as images (see image(6)). The small
files are the `icons' displayed by faces and seemail (see
faces(1)); for depths less than 4, their format is special.
One- and two-bit deep icons are stored as text, one line of
the file to one scan line of display. Each line is divided
into 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit big-endian words, stored as a
list of comma-separated hexadecimal C constants, such as:
0x9200, 0x1bb0, 0x003e,
This odd format is historical and the programs that read it
are somewhat forgiving about blanks and the need for commas.
The files lib/face/*/.dict hold a correspondence between
users at machines and face files. The format is
machine/user directory/file.ver
The machine is the domain name of the machine sending the
message, and user the name of the user sending it, as
recorded in /sys/log/mail. The directory is a further sub-
directory of (say) /lib/face/48x48x1, named by a single let-
ter corresponding to the first character of the user names.
The file is the name of the file, typically but not always
the user name, and ver is a number to distinguish different
images, for example to distinguish the image for Bill Gates
from the image for Bill Joy, both of which might otherwise
be called b/bill. For example, Bill Gates might be repre-
sented by the line
microsoft.com/bill b/bill.1
If multiple entries exist for a user in the various .dict
files, faces chooses the highest pixel size less than or
equal to that of the display on which it is running.
FACE(6) FACE(6)
Finally, or rather firstly, the file /lib/face/.machinelist
contains a list of machine/domain pairs, one per line, to
map any of a set of machines to a single domain name to be
looked up in the .dict files. The machine name may be a
regular expression, so for example the entry
.*research\.bell-labs\.com astro
maps any of the machines in Bell Labs Research into the
shorthand name astro, which then appears as a domain name in
the .dict files.
SEE ALSO
mail(1), tweak(1), image(6)