what about /etc/magic? (was Call for file types for Nautilus)

[Darin Adler <darin eazel com>]

on 2/24/01 11:42 AM, Liam Quin at liam holoweb net wrote:

> In any case, how many mime lists do I need on my system?

The MIME list Seth is talking about is the single MIME list for GNOME. Moved
from gnome-libs to gnome-vfs as part of the work on the Nautilus project.

> What happened to /etc/magic as the single repository for file type
> information, years ago?

I'm not familiar with /etc/magic. There's no file or directory by that name
on my system. As far as magic(5) is concerned, the file in /usr/share/magic,
part of the file(1) tool, maps magic numbers to human-readable file type
descriptions, but it does not have anything about MIME types in there.

> I'd rather see "magic" extended than this mess.  Then I can have
> a single place to say, no, don't run "uudecode" automatically
> (for examle; SunOS 3.x shipped with a "uudecode" mail alias as
> standard!).

The MIME magic code in GNOME is (and has always been) based on the same file
format as magic(5), but with MIME types rather than English text
descriptions. It might be nice to merge the two mechanisms some day.

    -- Darin