[spijdar]

"Unix" OSes in my experience simply don't (universally) have a way to "open this file in the correct application". It's a foreign concept. Files are just sequences of bytes, and file paths are just addresses to those bytes. The file extensions are, then, purely for the sake of the user, as there is no (standard) way to store file metadata. There are specific filesystems with these metadata extensions, but otherwise, you need to resort to commands like file and libmagic for heuristics on determining file-type.

Or just use the file suffix, which is AFAIK what all the mainstream Linux desktop environments do, through Freedesktop's MIME implementation. I don't know if it supports using metadata or file magics instead, but a quick glance shows almost every MIME definition uses file globbing.

You can check this in the files located at "/usr/share/mime/application" and "/usr/share/mime/packages" on most distros. Most (all?) definitions use a "glob pattern" to match files.

[ziml77]

I wonder if filesystems should be designed to store the MIME type alongside the file. Web browsers get MIME types alongside the data (and they do make use of that info).