Finding the preferred application for a given file extension via unix shell commands

Question

this may not be strictly about programming, but if I find no ready-made solution it may become a programming task: On UNIX, what is a command-line method f

Answer 1

To answer this myself, I've defined a simple (bash) function that works in the way I expect:

function show { 
    xdg-open $1 &> NUL
    }

xdg-open was almost exactly what I wanted, but it lets ugly program warnings slip through into the shell, which the above seems to fix.

Thanks all.