Is this a Nautilus bug?

[Dick Davies]

It uses the file extension. 

yes, that's really dumb.


On 08/08/05, Santanu Chatterjee <thisissantanu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Can you tell me what Nautilus uses to detect file types?
> I ask this because a very strange thing happened today.
> 
> I downloaded the entire set of plain text howtos in tar.bz form
> from tldp.org, and unzipped and untarred it in a directory.
> Then I opened the directory in Nautilus and clicked on a file
> but Nautilus said "Couldn't Display <filename>". Apparently,
> Nautilus could not determine the file type. Using 'file' in a
> terminal, I got this:
> ------------------------
> santanu at ubuntu:~/HOWTOS$ file IO-Port-Programming
> IO-Port-Programming: ISO-8859 English text
> ------------------------
> Even when I explicitly selected gedit to open the file from the
> "Open With Other Application" menu option, it said: "Could not
> add application".
> 
> Strangely enough, when I renamed the file by adding a .txt extension,
> Nautilus opened it using gedit without any problem at all!!
> 
> What is wrong with Nautilus? Is this a bug or is this intentional?
> It reminds of the quote in The Art of Unix Programming:
>      But the day Linux gives the Mac diagnostic that you can't open
>      a file because you don't have the application is the day Linux
>      becomes non-Unix.
>                           -- Doug McIlroy
> 
> Regards,
> Santanu Chatterjee
> 
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