Well, it's been a total failure

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Wed Sep 15 15:36:14 PDT 2010


On Wednesday, September 15, 2010 12:48:32 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.225.1284568096.858.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 
> > If you're on a non-Windows system, the mime-type becomes far more
> > important than
> > the extension. Most programs in Linux (and I believe MacOS X as well)
> > don't care
> > about the extension. They just look at the mime type. Extensions become
> > almost
> > entirely a thing for the user. So, whether your file is useable becomes
> > more of
> > an issue of known mime type than known extension. Still, you don't
> > generally
> > want to just be making up extensions.
> 
> I didn't think unix file systems had a concept of mime type.

They don't have a concept of file extension either. Mime types has to do with the 
contents of the file and file extensions has to do with the name of the file. It's 
programs which interpret those, not the file system. Typically, on Windows, the 
extension is used by the OS to determine which program to use to open a file. In 
unix, it's the mime type that's used to determine that.

The one bit of overlap there is the fact that Windows treats the exe extension 
essentially the way that unix treats the executable file attribute.

Now, I wouldn't advise ditching file extensions in unix, since it not only can 
help the human using them but there are occasionally programs which check the 
extension rather the mime type (so, ultimately, you may end up using both the 
extension and the mime type), but it's primarily the mime type which is used, 
and it's definitely the mime type which is used to determine which program to use 
to open a file in the desktop environments.

- Jonathan M Davis


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