Anyone know how to get in touch with the maintainers of 'file'? Seems the links in the man pages and Ian Darwin's site - http://www.darwinsys.com/file/ - don't work. The file magic database needs an update to correctly recognize PIE (Position Independent Executable) x86 ELF binaries as application/x-executable. This might seem an incredibly trivial thing, but it effectively stops graphical file managers from executing binaries, as they use magic (5) to identify files. Debian switched to making PIE a default for gcc for security reasons, but probably didn't expect it to break graphical UIs. Here's what I'm seeing: Expected behaviour: $ echo "int main() { return 0; }" > foo.c $ gcc -o foo foo.c $ file foo foo: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=6e7749f995a89a53f74ec29d3c16fcf3f56be90f, not stripped $ file --mime-type foo foo: application/x-executable Actual behaviour: $ echo "int main() { return 0; }" > foo.c $ gcc -o foo foo.c $ file foo foo: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=6e7749f995a89a53f74ec29d3c16fcf3f56be90f, not stripped $ file --mime-type foo foo: application/x-sharedlib Workaround: $ echo "int main() { return 0; }" > foo.c $ gcc -o foo-nopie foo.c -no-pie $ file foo-nopie foo-nopie: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=3eb8c581f43c19997e3c828f5a9730dbdc794470, not stripped $ file --mime-type foo-nopie foo-nopie: application/x-executable I'm a bit worried that the workaround allows less safe binaries to be double-clicked and run. I'm not sure how much of a security issue PIE vs non-PIE is, though. cheers, Stewart