[conspire] myopen(1)

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Thu Mar 26 22:45:29 PDT 2009


Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> You can make your own ~/.mailcap file to override the
> system one -- see man mailcap and the "run-mailcap"
> utility.

Really good idea, and indeed something I do a great deal -- except, I'd
never heard of the run-mailcap utility before.  My day is enriched.

I was actually intending to get back to Eric, and clarify that I 
have nothing _against_ software helping me open particular types of files
with an appropriate utility, as long as I know exactly what and when, and 
get to decide "if".  Setting up mailcap entries is a case in point:
In mutt, if I receive an all-HTML e-mail, a mailcap entry ensures that
lynx handles it transparently.  I'm happy with the threat model
involved:  It's something I can easily live with.  Similarly, if I
receive a file-attached MS-Word document and manually decide to "open"
it from inline, inside mutt, a mailcap entry feeds the file to wvDoc 
with suitable command-line options, causing display of the ASCII portion
of the contents.

Somehow, relying on limited, explicit mailcap entries that in turn
ultimately rely on OS-level parsing of the file's "magic number" (as
opposed to, say, believing filename extensions) gives me more warm
fuzzies than anything else I've encountered.





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