[Alpine-info] CentOS 6 upgrade breaks JPEG attachment viewer

[David Forrest]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2012, Roger Davis wrote:


> Hi David,

>

>> Several attachments came through as octet-stream and I wrote the 

>> octet-stream script to handle them.  I keep it in /usr/local/bin/ along 

>> with most other general binaries.  This script is the one I played with the 

>> most over the years and it has some old dead code snippets throughout. But 

>> it should work.

>

> So, the key here is that I just have to have a script named 'octet-stream' 

> installed somewhere in my executable search path? Curiously, it seems that 

> CentOS 6 (at least in my own UID enviroment which I believe is not too 

> perverse) does not have a built-in octet-stream executable anywhere in my 

> search path. Does this seem unusual?

>

> Thanks!

>

> Roger

>

I do not remember an octet-stream script coming with pine.  I had just 
received some mime attachments coded "application/octet-stream" and wrote 
up the script to decode them.  It ended up being more general as time went 
on but still is launched from my /etc/mailcap for unknown applications and 
things that need some preliminary work to decode.  Calling a viewer from 
the mailcap is the standard procedure.

When sending, alpine uses the /etc/mime.types file to code the mime type 
by extension.  It is standardized and gets updated often but some folks 
seem to ignore it and one may receive an odt or jpg as some other mime 
type.  The octect-stream script uses the "file" program which decodes the 
magic number at the start of the file (hopefully).

Dave
-- 
David Forrest                  e-mail   drf @  maplepark.com
Maple Park Development Corporation  http://xen.maplepark.com
St. Louis, Missouri    (Sent by ALPINE 2.02 FEDORA 11 LINUX)