[Tutor] opening a file directly from memory

[Alan Plum]

Dammit. Meant to send this over the list. Sorry, Alan.

On Di, 2009-11-17 at 21:33 +0000, Alan Gauld wrote:
> Unices, like Linux have file association tables - but these 
> are often associated with the desktop environment - KDE, Gnome etc.
> Finally for text files you should check the EDITOR and VISUAL 
> environment variables - although these are increasingly not 
> used or respected nowadays.

I find mimemagic to be quite reliable. File can be silly at times (it
routinely diagnoses my python scripts as Java source files). In my
gopher server I rely on mimemagic to make an educated guess and only use
file(1) as a last resort to find out whether it's a binary file or ASCII
text (some gopher clients don't support UTF8).

I'm not sure whether mimemagic is also available on other OSes, tho.


Cheers

Alan