How To Install mailcap on CentOS 8

mailcap is Helper application and MIME type associations for file types

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install mailcap on CentOS 8.

What is mailcap

The mailcap file is used by the metamail program. Metamail reads the mailcap file to determine how it should display non-text or multimedia material. Basically, mailcap associates a particular type of file with a particular program that a mail agent or other program can call in order to handle the file. Mailcap should be installed to allow certain programs to be able to handle non-text files. Also included in this package is the mime.types file which contains a list of MIME types and their filename “extension” associations, used by several applications e.g. to determine MIME types for filenames.

We can use yum or dnf to install mailcap on CentOS 8. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install mailcap.

Install mailcap on CentOS 8 Using dnf

Update yum database with dnf using the following command.

sudo dnf makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install mailcap using dnf by running the following command:

sudo dnf -y install mailcap

Install mailcap on CentOS 8 Using yum

Update yum database with yum using the following command.

sudo yum makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install mailcap using yum by running the following command:

sudo yum -y install mailcap

How To Uninstall mailcap on CentOS 8

To uninstall only the mailcap package we can use the following command:

sudo dnf remove mailcap

mailcap Package Contents on CentOS 8

/etc/mailcap
/etc/mime.types
/usr/share/doc/mailcap
/usr/share/doc/mailcap/NEWS
/usr/share/licenses/mailcap
/usr/share/licenses/mailcap/COPYING
/usr/share/man/man4/mailcap.4.gz

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install mailcap on CentOS 8 using yum and dnf.