Subj : Re: Determing file types
To   : comp.programming
From : Jeremy Phelps
Date : Wed Jul 13 2005 05:30 am

On 2005-07-11, Matthias Kaeppler <nospam@digitalraid.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am currently developing a filemanager and I was wondering if anyone 
> has an idea how I could determine the type of a file in the GUI (e.g. 
> "PDF File", "Plain Text", ...).
>
> I have played around with gnome-vfsmm a little, and it has a function 
> for getting the MIME type of a file; but just displaying that 
> information is not very attractive.
> Of course I could build a class which parses the MIME-string and builds 
> a more human readable filetype description, e.g. turn "audio/mpeg" into 
> "MP3 File".

If you're on a Linux system, there is probably already such a database
on the computer, given that file managers exist that say "PDF File" and
not "application/x-pdf". The output of the following command just might
contain the path on your Linux system to a text file that maps MIME types
to more "friendly" descriptions (or it might turn up nothing):

grep -ril 'plain text' /usr /etc 2>/dev/null | grep -i text/plain

.