Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets [Electronic resources]

file

Purpose

Display the type of data in a file based on rules defined in the

/usr/lib/magic file (this is known as the magic file).

Syntax

file [options]

files

Options

-c displays a parsed form of a magic file (or the default one) and exits.

-m

file1

[:

file2

: . . .] specifies other magic files.

-v displays the version number and exits.

-z looks inside compressed files.

Description

The

file command uses rules specified in the

/usr/lib/magic file to determine the type of data in the specified files. For example, you can use the

file command to check the type of each file in the

/usr/lib directory, as shown here:

file * | more 
alchemist:                          directory 
ao:                                 directory 
appletproxy.la:                     ASCII English text, with
very long lines 
appletproxy.so:                     ELF 32-bit LSB shared  object, Intel 80386,  version 1 (SYSV),  stripped 
aspell:                             directory 
autofs:                             directory 
bash:                               directory 
bcc:                                directory 
bonobo:                             directory 
bonobo-2.0:                         directory 
bonobo_confConf.sh:                 ASCII English text, with
very long lines 
bonoboConf.sh:                      ASCII English text, with
very long lines 
bonoboxConf.sh:                     ASCII English text, with
very long lines 
bonobox_printConf.sh:               ASCII English text, with
very long lines 
cracklib_dict.hwm:
data cracklib_dict.pwd:
data cracklib_dict.pwi:
data 
(. . . lines deleted)