Summary: Filetypes in OpenWindows

From: Harvey Berenberg Full - Time Programmer System Administrator (harvey@parvati.lv-whi.nevada.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 11 1996 - 15:51:25 CDT


Sun Managers,

The question I asked was:

>My users have been trying to edit some files from openwindows filemgr.
>When they double click on them the system cannot determine that
>they are simply ASCII files, and the image tool is brought up.
>Some of the files have the suffix '.raw '.
>If I remove the suffix the system suddenly recognizes
>them as ASCII. Does anyone know how tell filemgr that files with the
>suffix '.raw' is an ASCII file?

Solution:

The overwhelming answer was to use BINDER to associate a filename
suffix to a filetype. I was warned by some that the filetype '.raw'
was a suffix used by some graphics programs, and that changing it
could cause problems. I checked, and indeed '.raw' is a graphics filetype.
I don't believe we are using anything like that at the moment, so I'm
going to take a chance and change it.

What I have done is to create a personal, cetable, with the
rules I need, using BINDER. This worked very well. I copied the
cetable to a public area and set the environment variable CEPATH
to point to it.
        
  EX. setenv CEPATH $home/.cetables:/usr/local/bin:$OPENWINHOME/cetables

        where: $home/.cetables -- is the users personal copy location
                /usr/local/bin -- is the one that takes care of my problem.
                $OPENWINHOME/cetables -- is the Solaris version location

*note: Everyone's .cshrc, sources a centrally administered .cshrc which makes
the above easy to implement in our environment.
 
Only time will tell whether my users will be happy with this solution.

Other suggestions were:

One person advised me to use cd_db_build to convert the classEngine database
(cetables) to ascii and then edit it and convert it back. I have not tried
this. Because I would rather not change the standard one if I can avoid it.

Look at the /usr/openwin/etc/tt/types.xdr.

Check out RTFM.

Thanks to the below people who responded to my question:

anderson@neon.mitre.org
charles@renoir.Grafnetix.COM
cecilp@adonis.westel.com
bobf@psa.pencom.com
peter@jrc.nl
bern@TI.Uni-Trier.DE
rich@brake.demon.co.uk

I am in your debt thanks again,

Harvey Berenberg
UNLV/Biology

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