On Oct 16, 2006, at 1:50 AM, Joost Verburg wrote:
Bennett Helm wrote:
On Mac OS X, what works best is not "auto" but "open" (which OS X
uses internally to open files). As I've discovered over the last
couple months, "auto" sometimes does strange things when the user
has not explicitly defined a viewer/editor for a particular file
type, though when the user has done so, "auto" seems to work fine.
Does Mac OS X still need the UNIX application detection or are
these "file associations" always used? Does everything work when
you set all viewers to "open"?
"open" works for standard OS X programs, not for command-line
programs or for X11 programs (like xfig or xdvi). For xdvi, there are
Mac native alternatives, and the "open" command will properly use
those, but if a user does not have one of these alternatives, xdvi
will not be found by "open".
In short, Mac needs UNIX application detection when there is no
native program available for that file type.
Moreover, to use X11 programs, we must ensure that X11 is already
running, and we must define a DISPLAY. So, for xdvi we need to have
something like this:
open -a X11.app; export DISPLAY=:0.0; xdvi
Bennett
