Proposal for std.path replacement

[Christopher Nicholson-Sauls]

On 03/07/11 00:09, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message 
> news:mailman.2280.1299459971.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>
>> This reminds me. I should look into mime types one of these days to see 
>> what the
>> appropriate way (if any) would be to put support for them in Phobos. It 
>> would be
>> nice to not have to go by extension for the few programs that I have which 
>> have
>> to worry about file type.
>>
> 
> I'm no unix expert, but my understanding is that mime types in the 
> filesystem don't even exist at all, and that what it *really* does is use 
> some complex black-box-ish algorithm that takes into account the first few 
> bytes of the file, the extention, the exec flag, and god-knows-what-else to 
> determine what type of file it is. Contrary to how people keep making it 
> sound, mime type is *not* the determining factor (and cannot possibly be), 
> but rather nothing more than the way the *result* of all that analysis is 
> represented.
> 
> 

One could likely get a good grip of the "black box" by studying the
source of the common "file" utility.  It can be surprisingly detailed in
some cases, such as the following real example:

$ file debug.log
debug.log: UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines

It does generate mime types as well:

$ file -bi debug.log
text/plain; charset=utf-8

-- Chris N-S