Equivalent of unix "file <filename>" in ruby?

Ruby
1

Hi all,
I’m trying to find out what is the equivalent of file from
unix in ruby. Basically this command gives the file type - ASCII, BINARY
etc.

Please help!
-Thanks

2

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Ruby R. wrote:

Hi all,
I’m trying to find out what is the equivalent of file from
unix in ruby. Basically this command gives the file type - ASCII, BINARY
etc.

There is currently nothing written in ruby that uses a library of
signatures to attempt to figure out the file type of a file. The best
you
can do right now is a library that looks at the file suffix and
determines
what file type matches it.

Download Austin Zeigler’s mime-types lib (when Rubyforge is playing
nicely
again).

mime_type = MIME::Types.type_for(filename)

Kirk H.

3

Ruby R. wrote:

I’m trying to find out what is the equivalent of file from
unix in ruby. Basically this command gives the file type - ASCII, BINARY

If your program will always run on a system where that command is
available, you could do:
file_type = file #{filename}

4

On 10/10/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Ruby R. wrote:

Hi all,
I’m trying to find out what is the equivalent of file from
unix in ruby. Basically this command gives the file type - ASCII, BINARY
etc.
There is currently nothing written in ruby that uses a library of
signatures to attempt to figure out the file type of a file. The best you
can do right now is a library that looks at the file suffix and determines
what file type matches it.

That’s not quite true. I think it’s safer to say that there’s
nothing currently working in Ruby that does that. However, CRUserS
(the Calgary Ruby U.’ Society) is working on a libmagic port to
Ruby as part of an ongoing hacking night. I’m not sure their current
status, and hope that they’ll be setting things up to link into
MIME::Types when it’s all done, but they are working on it and there
is code in their source repository on RubyForge.

-austin

5

On 10/10/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/libmagic-ruby/

Yes. Filemagic only binds to the existing libmagic, which still
doesn’t help much for Windows users.

-austin

6

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Austin Z. wrote:

That’s not quite true. I think it’s safer to say that there’s
nothing currently working in Ruby that does that. However, CRUserS
(the Calgary Ruby U.’ Society) is working on a libmagic port to
Ruby as part of an ongoing hacking night. I’m not sure their current
status, and hope that they’ll be setting things up to link into
MIME::Types when it’s all done, but they are working on it and there
is code in their source repository on RubyForge.

there is

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/filemagic/

is this their project probably?

http://rubyforge.org/projects/libmagic-ruby/

cheers.

-a