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.