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file – determine file type

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS ENVIRONMENT FILES EXIT STATUS EXAMPLES SEE ALSO STANDARDS CONFORMANCE SECURITY MAGIC DIRECTORY HISTORY LEGAL NOTICE BUGS TODO AVAILABILITY

file [-bcdEhiklLNnprsSvzZ0] [-apple] [-exclude-quiet] [-extension] [-mime-encoding] [-mime-type] [-e testname] [-F separator] [-f namefile] [-m magicfiles] [-P name=value] file ...
file -C [-m magicfiles]
file [-help]

-apple
	Causes the file command to output the file type and creator code as used by older MacOS versions. The code consists of eight letters, the first describing the file type, the latter the creator. This option works properly only for file formats that have the apple-style output defined.
-b -, -brief
	Do not prepend filenames to output lines (brief mode).
-C -, -compile
	Write a magic.mgc output file that contains a pre-parsed version of the magic file or directory.
-c -, -checking-printout
	Cause a checking printout of the parsed form of the magic file. This is usually used in conjunction with the -m option to debug a new magic file before installing it.
-d
	Prints internal debugging information to stderr.
-E
	On filesystem errors (file not found etc), instead of handling the error as regular output as POSIX mandates and keep going, issue an error message and exit.
-e -, -exclude testname
	Exclude the test named in testname from the list of tests made to determine the file type. Valid test names are:

apptype	EMX application type (only on EMX).
ascii	Various types of text files (this test will try to guess the text encoding, irrespective of the setting of the 'encoding' option).
encoding
	Different text encodings for soft magic tests.
tokens	Ignored for backwards compatibility.
cdf	Prints details of Compound Document Files.
compress
	Checks for, and looks inside, compressed files.
csv	Checks Comma Separated Value files.
elf	Prints ELF file details, provided soft magic tests are enabled and the elf magic is found.
json	Examines JSON (RFC-7159) files by parsing them for compliance.
soft	Consults magic files.
tar	Examines tar files by verifying the checksum of the 512 byte tar header. Excluding this test can provide more detailed content description by using the soft magic method.
text	A synonym for 'ascii'.

-exclude-quiet
	Like -exclude but ignore tests that file does not know about. This is intended for compatibility with older versions of file.
-extension
	Print a slash-separated list of valid extensions for the file type found.
-F -, -separator separator
	Use the specified string as the separator between the filename and the file result returned. Defaults to 'amp;:'.
-f -, -files-from namefile
	Read the names of the files to be examined from namefile (one per line) before the argument list. Either namefile or at least one filename argument must be present; to test the standard input, use '-' as a filename argument. Please note that namefile is unwrapped and the enclosed filenames are processed when this option is encountered and before any further options processing is done. This allows one to process multiple lists of files with different command line arguments on the same file invocation. Thus if you want to set the delimiter, you need to do it before you specify the list of files, like: "-F @ -f namefile", instead of: "-f namefile -F @".
-h -, -no-dereference
	This option causes symlinks not to be followed (on systems that support symbolic links). This is the default if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is not defined.
-i -, -mime
	Causes the file command to output mime type strings rather than the more traditional human readable ones. Thus it may say 'text/plain; charset=us-ascii' rather than "ASCII text".
-mime-type -, -mime-encoding
	Like -i, but print only the specified element(s).
-k -, -keep-going
	Don't stop at the first match, keep going. Subsequent matches will be have the string '[rs]012- ' prepended. (If you want a newline, see the -r option.) The magic pattern with the highest strength (see the -l option) comes first.
-l -, -list
	Shows a list of patterns and their strength sorted descending by magic(5) strength which is used for the matching (see also the -k option).
-L -, -dereference
	This option causes symlinks to be followed, as the like-named option in ls(1) (on systems that support symbolic links). This is the default if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is defined.
-m -, -magic-file magicfiles
	Specify an alternate list of files and directories containing magic. This can be a single item, or a colon-separated list. If a compiled magic file is found alongside a file or directory, it will be used instead.
-N -, -no-pad
	Don't pad filenames so that they align in the output.
-n -, -no-buffer
	Force stdout to be flushed after checking each file. This is only useful if checking a list of files. It is intended to be used by programs that want filetype output from a pipe.
-p -, -preserve-date
	On systems that support utime(3) or utimes(2), attempt to preserve the access time of files analyzed, to pretend that file never read them.
-P -, -parameter name=value
	Set various parameter limits. Name Default Explanation bytes 1048576 max number of bytes to read from file elf_notes 256 max ELF notes processed elf_phnum 2048 max ELF program sections processed elf_shnum 32768 max ELF sections processed encoding 65536 max number of bytes to scan for encoding evaluation indir 50 recursion limit for indirect magic name 50 use count limit for name/use magic regex 8192 length limit for regex searches
-r -, -raw
	Don't translate unprintable characters to \ooo. Normally file translates unprintable characters to their octal representation.
-s -, -special-files
	Normally, file only attempts to read and determine the type of argument files which stat(2) reports are ordinary files. This prevents problems, because reading special files may have peculiar consequences. Specifying the -s option causes file to also read argument files which are block or character special files. This is useful for determining the filesystem types of the data in raw disk partitions, which are block special files. This option also causes file to disregard the file size as reported by stat(2) since on some systems it reports a zero size for raw disk partitions.
-S -, -no-sandbox
	On systems where libseccomp ( https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp) is available, the -S option disables sandboxing which is enabled by default. This option is needed for file to execute external decompressing programs, i.e. when the -z option is specified and the built-in decompressors are not available. On systems where sandboxing is not available, this option has no effect.
-v -, -version
	Print the version of the program and exit.
-z -, -uncompress
	Try to look inside compressed files.
-Z -, -uncompress-noreport
	Try to look inside compressed files, but report information about the contents only not the compression.
-0 -, -print0
	Output a null character '\0' after the end of the filename. Nice to cut(1) the output. This does not affect the separator, which is still printed. If this option is repeated more than once, then file prints just the filename followed by a NUL followed by the description (or ERROR: text) followed by a second NUL for each entry.
--help
	Print a help message and exit.

The environment variable MAGIC can be used to set the default magic file name. If that variable is set, then file will not attempt to open $HOME/.magic. file adds " .mgc" to the value of this variable as appropriate. The environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT controls (on systems that support symbolic links), whether file will attempt to follow symlinks or not. If set, then file follows symlink, otherwise it does not. This is also controlled by the -L and -h options.

/usr/share/misc/magic.mgc
	Default compiled list of magic.
/usr/share/misc/magic	Directory containing default magic files.

file will exit with 0 if the operation was successful or >0 if an error was encountered. The following errors cause diagnostic messages, but don't affect the program exit code (as POSIX requires), unless -E is specified:

• A file cannot be found
• There is no permission to read a file
• The file type cannot be determined

$ file file.c file /dev/{wd0a,hda}
file.c:   C program text
file:     ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV),
          dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
/dev/wd0a: block special (0/0)
/dev/hda: block special (3/0)

$ file -s /dev/wd0{b,d}
/dev/wd0b: data
/dev/wd0d: x86 boot sector

$ file -s /dev/hda{,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}
/dev/hda:   x86 boot sector
/dev/hda1:  Linux/i386 ext2 filesystem
/dev/hda2:  x86 boot sector
/dev/hda3:  x86 boot sector, extended partition table
/dev/hda4:  Linux/i386 ext2 filesystem
/dev/hda5:  Linux/i386 swap file
/dev/hda6:  Linux/i386 swap file
/dev/hda7:  Linux/i386 swap file
/dev/hda8:  Linux/i386 swap file
/dev/hda9:  empty
/dev/hda10: empty

$ file -i file.c file /dev/{wd0a,hda}
file.c:      text/x-c
file:        application/x-executable
/dev/hda:    application/x-not-regular-file
/dev/wd0a:   application/x-not-regular-file

This program is believed to exceed the System V Interface Definition of FILE(CMD), as near as one can determine from the vague language contained therein. Its behavior is mostly compatible with the System V program of the same name. This version knows more magic, however, so it will produce different (albeit more accurate) output in many cases.

The one significant difference between this version and System V is that this version treats any white space as a delimiter, so that spaces in pattern strings must be escaped. For example,

>10     string  language impress(imPRESS data)

in an existing magic file would have to be changed to

>10     string  language\ impress       (imPRESS data)

In addition, in this version, if a pattern string contains a backslash, it must be escaped. For example

0       string          \begindata      Andrew Toolkit document

in an existing magic file would have to be changed to

0       string          \\begindata     Andrew Toolkit document

SunOS releases 3.2 and later from Sun Microsystems include a file command derived from the System V one, but with some extensions. This version differs from Sun's only in minor ways. It includes the extension of the '' operator, used as, for example,

>16     long0x7fffffff  >0              not stripped

The magic file entries have been collected from various sources, mainly USENET, and contributed by various authors. Christos Zoulas (address below) will collect additional or corrected magic file entries. A consolidation of magic file entries will be distributed periodically.

The order of entries in the magic file is significant. Depending on what system you are using, the order that they are put together may be incorrect. If your old file command uses a magic file, keep the old magic file around for comparison purposes (rename it to /usr/share/misc/magic.orig).

There has been a file command in every UNIX since at least Research Version 4 (man page dated November, 1973). The System V version introduced one significant major change: the external list of magic types. This slowed the program down slightly but made it a lot more flexible.

This program, based on the System V version, was written by Ian Darwin <ian@darwinsys.com> without looking at anybody else's source code.

John Gilmore revised the code extensively, making it better than the first version. Geoff Collyer found several inadequacies and provided some magic file entries. Contributions of the '' operator by Rob McMahon, <cudcv@warwick.ac.uk>, 1989.

Guy Harris, <guy@netapp.com>, made many changes from 1993 to the present.

Primary development and maintenance from 1990 to the present by Christos Zoulas <christos@astron.com>.

Altered by Chris Lowth <chris@lowth.com>, 2000: handle the -i option to output mime type strings, using an alternative magic file and internal logic.

Altered by Eric Fischer <enf@pobox.com>, July, 2000, to identify character codes and attempt to identify the languages of non-ASCII files.

Altered by Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>, 2007-2011, to improve MIME support, merge MIME and non-MIME magic, support directories as well as files of magic, apply many bug fixes, update and fix a lot of magic, improve the build system, improve the documentation, and rewrite the Python bindings in pure Python.

The list of contributors to the 'magic' directory (magic files) is too long to include here. You know who you are; thank you. Many contributors are listed in the source files.

Fix output so that tests for MIME and APPLE flags are not needed all over the place, and actual output is only done in one place. This needs a design. Suggestion: push possible outputs on to a list, then pick the last-pushed (most specific, one hopes) value at the end, or use a default if the list is empty. This should not slow down evaluation.

The handling of MAGIC_CONTINUE and printing \012- between entries is clumsy and complicated; refactor and centralize.

Some of the encoding logic is hard-coded in encoding.c and can be moved to the magic files if we had a !:charset annotation.

Continue to squash all magic bugs. See Debian BTS for a good source.

Store arbitrarily long strings, for example for %s patterns, so that they can be printed out. Fixes Debian bug #271672. This can be done by allocating strings in a string pool, storing the string pool at the end of the magic file and converting all the string pointers to relative offsets from the string pool.

Add syntax for relative offsets after current level (Debian bug #466037).

Make file -ki work, i.e. give multiple MIME types.

Add a zip library so we can peek inside Office2007 documents to print more details about their contents.

Add an option to print URLs for the sources of the file descriptions.

Combine script searches and add a way to map executable names to MIME types (e.g. have a magic value for !:mime which causes the resulting string to be looked up in a table). This would avoid adding the same magic repeatedly for each new hash-bang interpreter.

When a file descriptor is available, we can skip and adjust the buffer instead of the hacky buffer management we do now.

Fix "name" and "use" to check for consistency at compile time (duplicate "name", "use" pointing to undefined "name" ). Make "name" / "use" more efficient by keeping a sorted list of names. Special-case ^ to flip endianness in the parser so that it does not have to be escaped, and document it.

If the offsets specified internally in the file exceed the buffer size ( HOWMANY variable in file.h), then we don't seek to that offset, but we give up. It would be better if buffer managements was done when the file descriptor is available so we can seek around the file. One must be careful though because this has performance and thus security considerations, because one can slow down things by repeateadly seeking.

There is support now for keeping separate buffers and having offsets from the end of the file, but the internal buffer management still needs an overhaul.

You can obtain the original author's latest version by anonymous FTP on ftp.astron.com in the directory /pub/file/file-X.YZ.tar.gz.