FACE(6)FACE(6)NAMEface - 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 hexadeci‐
mal C constants, such as:
0x9200, 0x1bb0, 0x003e,
This odd format is historical and the programs that read it are some‐
what 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 subdirectory of (say) /lib/face/48x48x1,
named by a single letter 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 represented 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 dis‐
play on which it is running.
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 ALSOmail(1), tweak(1), image(6)FACE(6)