Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The only thing that comes to mind, is to implement a mini-program > (unless it already has been written) that takes two parameters, eg > > run-mime-type text/html /path/to/file.html > > That would automatically parse /etc/mailcap and do the `right' thing, > for the file /path/to/file.html, given it is text/html. > > Entries in /etc/binfmt_misc would contain statements like the above > instead of the end program. > > This could be implemented with you original proposal with no changes > (except the extra program), but having it integrated with the mime setup > would be nice ;-).
Could I clarify some stuff please? Are we proposing that all mime-types have binfmt_misc setup? Does that mean, the kernel will be able to `run' any file in mailcap? Is that what we really want? I am neither fore, nor against this idea. On the one hand it would be quite cool, entering the name of an html document on the command line and it loading in lynx. On the other hand it goes against the Unix philosophy a bit, documents are programs are documents. Another question is are their mime-types for all the programs we might want to run in this way? The programs I can think of off-hand, are Java, DOS EXE, and Windows EXE, are there any others? If we go with the ability to run documents like images and so on, do we have all the mime-types? Are we going to have to invent new mime-types? Is that a bad thing to do? Some more questions. Is it possible to recognise an html file by a couple of magic numbers at the beginning? Most html starts <html> or <HTML>, but it is not certian that it will look like this. Another thought is the possiblilty of running perl scripts without the bang path, but then how would the shell tell it is a perl script. If we put loads of entries into binfmt_misc are we likely to fill some kernel data table? What happens if it overloads? Do we significantly affect the performance of the system? If the kernel is checking each file against a list of magic numbers will it take a long time to run a file? (Probably not the kernel is fast, and most files we will run will be ELF, which is probably checked first.) This is not user independant is it? The system can not be set so that one user has support for running Java/JPEGs from the command line, and another does not? -- I consume, therefore I am
