On Sunday, December 10, 2017 at 11:15:15 AM UTC+5:30, Frank Millman wrote: > "Rustom Mody" wrote in message > > > <anecdote> > I was sending some files to some students. > Since it was more than one, the natural choice was a tarball. > [I believe that since it was a very tiny total space I did not compress the > tarball… but I dont remember this part exactly] > The point is that instead of sending a stuff.tgz or stuff.tar file I sent a > file > called just stuff; ie I must have done: > $ tar xvf stuff directory > rather than the more normal > $ tar xvf stuff.tar directory > > I got a return mail soon enough: “Your file is corrupt; it wont open” > (in file-roller or whatever tar-GUI the kids nowadays use) > > I could have given them the answer: There are no associations in > Linux. Just > $ mv stuff stuff.tar > and it will work > As it happens I am lazy; easier to believe that my file was "wrongly" named; > did the mv myself, and resent the now "correct" tarball; problem solved. > </anecdote> > > > I had a similar experience a few years ago, but the recipient was not a > student, but a bank's IT department! > > I had to send them an encrypted document, and their spec specified PGP. I > used GPG instead, which produces exactly the same result, but with a .gpg > file extension. > > I was told that my file did not work. After much time trying to figure out > what was wrong, I spoke to one of their staff over the phone, and asked him > to right-click on the file, select 'rename', and change '.gpg' to '.pgp'. He > did so, tried again, and said 'Ah, now it works'.
Inspired by this thread, I added alias o="xdg-open" to my ~/.bash_aliases And as best as I can see, now $ o foo.png $ o bar.mp3 $ o baz.pdf and $ o http://python.org all do the “Right Thing” My main attraction for this is that I often end up doing evince foo.png instead of eog foo.png The one thing that does not work (yet) is $ o foo.py starts up gedit (instead of emacs) PS. As it happens I had figured out something for my students some years ago: https://bitbucket.org/rustom/vit-projects/wiki/emacsasdefault I’ll have to reread and recheckout what I wrote back then 😉 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
