Question

In Linux, is there a way to ask any xdg services, or gtk services, which application is the default application for a given file?

I realize that xdg-open will in fact, launch the correct application. However, I want to be able to display the application’s name in a context menu. So that when the user clicks on the menu item, it will then launch xdg-open, which will launch that app.

On OSX I can use LaunchServices for this:

def getDefaultDarwinApplication(path):
    import LaunchServices
    import CoreData
    import urllib

    url = CoreData.CFURLRef.URLWithString_("file://"+urllib.quote(path))
    os_status, app_ref, appurl = LaunchServices.LSGetApplicationForURL(url, LaunchServices.kLSRolesAll, None, None)
    if os_status != 0:
        return ""
    apppath = app_ref.as_pathname()
    name = os.path.basename(apppath).replace(".app", "")
    return name

The hope is that there is something similar on Linux I can use. A builtin python module would be best, but even screen scraping would work.

Answer 1

Even better I found the official gnome way to do this.

import gio
mime_type = gio.content_type_guess('foo.txt')
app_infos = gio.gio.app_info_get_all_for_type(mime_type)
for app_info in app_infos:
    print app_info.get_name(), app_info.get_executable(), app_info.get_icon()
# pure bliss