Subject: Re: bug#18132: Time for a smarter dired-guess-shell-alist-default? (dired-x.el)

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:06:27 +0100

On Sat, 23 Oct 2021 at 10:48, Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> > More generally, I'm not sure mailcap is the right tool for the job:
> > its main purpose is to view attachments to email messages, where we
> > generally have metadata (MIME etc.) which is not necessarily available
> > for arbitrary disk files.
>
> Isn't that just "file --mime-type -b"?  file is a BSD command AFAICT so
> it should presumably be available almost everywhere.
>
> I also see in the man page than a certain Reuben Thomas has been
> involved in its development so maybe he has something to add here.  :-)
>

I agree with Eli that mailcap is not the right tool for the job.

file's MIME-type support is easy to fix for types that don't (yet) have a
MIME type supplied; file is actively maintained and frequently released.
Note that xdg-open won't use file on a system that has its own MIME-type
handling, such as GNOME.

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