Re: [GNUnet-developers] Textui stuff

[Blake Matheny]

You might want to check out the source code for the file(1) utility. It uses a
pretty simple (but effective) method of examing the header of a file and
determining a type from there. A simple method to do this is to grab the hex of
the files header, and compare it with the existing magic file (typically
/usr/share/misc/magic. Example:

[duke 10] matheny > file textutils-2.0.tar.gz 
textutils-2.0.tar.gz: gzip compressed data

[duke 11] matheny > hexdump -c textutils-2.0.tar.gz | head -1
0000000 037 213  \b  \0 025   L   «   7 002 003   ì   <   k   s 033   7

[duke 12] misc > grep "gzip compressed data" /usr/share/misc/magic
0       string          \037\213        gzip compressed data

As you can see, the hexdump matches the definition from /usr/share/misc/magic.
For the several file types I tried this always work. I think it would be pretty
simple to hack this out. Anyone see anything wrong with this method?

-Blake

Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?
> Sunday has rolled around, and I'm bored. 
> 
> I started thinking about the textui a little bit and about how there is a
> special handler for inserting mp3 files. That got me thinking about
> scalibility, so instead of working on a curses ui I decided to work on
> automatic keywording instead.
> 
> Basically the idea that I'm working on is to keep a linked list along the
> lines of:
> 
> struct hand_l {
>         char *t_mime;                 //the "text" in "text/html"
>                 char *b_mime;                 //the "html" in "text/html"
>                 int *function;        //pointer to function that handles 
> keywords
>                                                                               
> //for this mime type
>                 struct hand_l* next;  //the next node
>  }
> 
> The idea is that a function can register itself for handling the finding
> of keywords for a particular file type so that keywords can be figured out
> for more than just mp3s. Eventually with this idea, one will be able to
> call char * makekeywords(char *filename), which will return a space
> seperated list of keywords for any given file.
> 
> I haven't figured out yet how to automatically determine the mime type of 
> a file, though I assume that somewhere out there a library exists that
> takes a filename in, and returns the mime type.
> 
> Why do I think doing this automatic keyword building is important? People
> are lazy. Actually, people are *really* lazy. So lazy that I suspect a lot
> of people would rarely bother to enter keywords. Having gnunet figure out
> keywords automatically would mitigate this problem.
> 
> By the way, I use vi with tab spaces set to three (in vi :set ts=3)
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> GnuPG fingerprint AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400
> James Blackwell  --  Director http://www.linuxguru.net



-- 
Blake Matheny
address@hidden
PGP-Key http://www.dbaseiv.net/purdue.key