On Wednesday, September 15, 2010 12:48:32 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... > > > If you're on a non-Windows system, the mime-type becomes far more > > important than > > the extension. Most programs in Linux (and I believe MacOS X as well) > > don't care > > about the extension. They just look at the mime type. Extensions become > > almost > > entirely a thing for the user. So, whether your file is useable becomes > > more of > > an issue of known mime type than known extension. Still, you don't > > generally > > want to just be making up extensions. > > I didn't think unix file systems had a concept of mime type.
They don't have a concept of file extension either. Mime types has to do with the contents of the file and file extensions has to do with the name of the file. It's programs which interpret those, not the file system. Typically, on Windows, the extension is used by the OS to determine which program to use to open a file. In unix, it's the mime type that's used to determine that. The one bit of overlap there is the fact that Windows treats the exe extension essentially the way that unix treats the executable file attribute. Now, I wouldn't advise ditching file extensions in unix, since it not only can help the human using them but there are occasionally programs which check the extension rather the mime type (so, ultimately, you may end up using both the extension and the mime type), but it's primarily the mime type which is used, and it's definitely the mime type which is used to determine which program to use to open a file in the desktop environments. - Jonathan M Davis
