MIME Type Registry

The MIME type registry is located in /usr/gnome/share/mime-info. The MIME type registry contains the following files:

The following sections describe MIME information files and MIME keys files.

MIME Information Files

MIME information files associate MIME types with one or both of the following:

• Filename extensions

• Filename patterns

When an application searches for the MIME type of a file, the application checks the filename against the MIME information files. If a match for the filename is found, the MIME type associated with the extension or pattern is the MIME type of the file.

In MIME information files, the filename pattern to search for is written as a regular expression.

The format of MIME type entries in MIME information files is as follows:

MIME-type
		ext[,priority]: list-of-extensions
		regex[,priority]: list-of-regular-expressions

You can specify a priority value for the filename extension and the regular expression. You can use the priority value to differentiate composite filenames. For example, you can assign a priority of 1 to the .gz extension, and assign a higher priority of 2 to the .tar.gz extension. In this case, the file abc.tar.gz takes the MIME type for .tar.gz.

You must indent the ext field and the regex field with a tab character (\t).

The following MIME type entries are samples from the gnome-vfs.mime MIME information file:

application/x-compressed-tar
		regex,2: tar\.gz$
		ext: tgz
audio/x-real-audio
		ext: rm ra ram
image/jpeg
		ext: jpe jpeg jpg
image/png
		ext: png
text/html
		ext: html htm HTML
text/plain
		ext: asc txt TXT
text/x-readme
		regex: README.*

The file manager reads the MIME information files alphabetically. The alphabetical order determines the order in which MIME types are assigned to filename extensions or regular expressions. For example, if the same file extension is assigned to different MIME types in the files abc.mime and def.mime, the MIME type in abc.mime is used.

MIME Keys Files

MIME keys file provide information about a MIME type that is used in the user interface. For example, the MIME keys file provides a description of a MIME type, and specifies an icon to represent files of that MIME type.

The following is a sample from a MIME keys file:

text/html
		description=HTML page
		icon_filename=gnome-text-html
		default_action_type=application
		short_list_application_ids_for_novice_user_level=mozilla,netscape,galeon
		category=Documents/World Wide Web

You must indent the keys in a MIME keys file with a tab character (\t).

Table 4–2 describes the most important keys in MIME keys files. Typically, the description key and the category key are localized.