HOW TO SET FILE ASSOCIATIONS OF FILE WITH COMMAND LINE IN LINUX

QUES: Why would one choose to use command line for changing file associaiton........?

ANS: Several times you come across a situation when you have to setup file associations from the command line. Like sometimes, file managers just won't work, other times you may have a corrupted file or bad line in your file.It involves just 3 steps as follows : 

STEP 1) Then query the file to figure out the mimetype syntax

[user@linux:~]$xdg-mime query filetype /home/linux/Desktop/vid.flv [user@linux:~]$video/x-flv

STEP 2) Check what the default program is of that mimetype.

[user@linux:~]$xdg-mime query default video/x-flv

STEP 3) Set the file association 

[user@linux:~]$xdg-mime default vlc.desktop

NOTE :-- Here I knew the programme name to be associated with the new filetype, so I jumped to the step 3 after the step 2. If you dont know the programme names and there association then follow these steps.

ADDITIONAL STEP : Figure out what the programname.desktop of the program you want to use is.The simplest way to do this is by checking your mimeapps.list file located here.

[user@linux:~]$vi /home/linux/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list If that doesn't work try searching for the file with a similar command. [user@linux:~]$find / -iname '*vlc.desktop*' 2>/dev/null

 
If the programname.desktop file has a weird name then you will need to grep for that file.Here I will use the vlc media player.

[user@linux:~]$grep -ri "vlc media player" /usr/share/applications/* 2>/dev/null [user@linux:~]$/usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop:Name=VLC media player For Centos/Fedora/Rhel users if they find this error while changing the file types -- [user@linux:~]$/usr/bin/xdg-mime: line 532: kde-config: command not found follow this link(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25563#c2) [user@linux:~]$find / -iname '*vlc.desktop*' 2>/dev/null