Re: Random idea:
On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, Dirk Ritter wrote:
> This leads me to a final question - maybe you want your shell's
> interpreter hack to decide what interpreter to run based on the
> file type? Of course - text files can be made executable and if
> you write '#/bin/emacs' in the first line you will be able to start
> emacs and load the file you want to edit. This is ugly since it will
> break under GNU/Linux where emacs is under '/usr/bin' and of course
> it would corrupt JPEG data, so the mechanism needs to be extended.
> Since some people might just want to prefer different applications
> for their work this needs to be made configurable at least on a per
> user base - something that is an ideal job for something like gnome
> core components or similar applications - do you still feel that it
> is beneficial to offer such functionality inside core OS components
> such as file systems or exec servers? I doubt it.
Using #! wouldn't be a very good solution. You could solve the path
problem and make it user-configurable hacking the #! header interpreter to
take something like '#!text-editor' or '#!gz-uncompress', so it could be
user-configurable (User A sets text-editor to vi, User B sets it to
emacs). However, this only allows one action per user to be taken upon
exectution of the file.
A nice solution would be nearly like W95's system for executing files,
except using the 'file' command (or something similar that returns a MIME
type) to get the file's type instead of using the file's extension. For a
GUI, this wouldn't be too hard to do, but in text-mode, you might want a
'run' program to take the default action. Also have an 'alt' program
to give a list of all actions, and let the user select one. The system
could have a global database of actions for each file type, and users
could have their own preferences.
Note: For those fortunate enough to not have used '95,
double-left-clicking on a file uses a default action for that extension
type, and right-clicking brings up a menu of all actions registered for
that extension. Each action has a name ('Edit') and the program to use for
it ('/bin/vi'). Unknown file types have the default action of 'Open
with...'.
Mark Lundeberg <aa026@pgfn.bc.ca>
http://www.pgfn.bc.ca/~aa026/
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