Re: [orca-list] GNOME File Associations

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 04:32:55AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Right; I've already been through that section.  I'm really interested
> in the mapping of file extensions to applications.

There might be a slight misunderstanding here: Linux usually doesn't rely on
file extensions. It examines the contents of the file to determine what kind
of file it is. If you use the file command from the shell it will give you the
file type.

Somewhere in Gnome there will be a mapping of file types to applications.

The file command is configurable: you can add to the strings and patterns that
it uses to identify the type of the file.

The advantage of this arrangement is that the file name doesn't matter. So, if
I have a PDF file:
jason jdc:/tmp$ file test.pdf
test.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
jason jdc:/tmp$ mv test.pdf test.something
jason jdc:/tmp$ file test.something
test.something: PDF document, version 1.4