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file — determine file type
| Use Case | Command | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 🔍 Basic file type check | file filename | Determine the type of a file (text, executable, data, etc.) |
| 📄 Show MIME type | file -i filename | Output MIME type string (e.g., text/plain; charset=utf-8) |
| 📂 List valid extensions | file --extension filename | Print slash-separated list of valid extensions for the file type |
| 📁 Read file list from names file | file -f namefile | Read filenames from a file (one per line) and check them |
| 🔗 Follow symlinks | file -L filename | Follow symbolic links (default when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set) |
| 🚫 Do not follow symlinks | file -h filename | Do not follow symbolic links (default when POSIXLY_CORRECT is not set) |
| 🗜️ Look inside compressed files | file -z filename.gz | Try to identify the contents of compressed files |
| 📏 Show magic pattern strengths | file -l | List magic patterns and their strength scores |
| 🔧 Debug magic file | file -c -m magicfile | Check parsed form of magic file (for debugging) |
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]This manual page documents version 5.41 of the file command.
file tests each argument in an attempt to classify it. There are three sets of tests, performed in this order: filesystem tests, magic tests, and language tests. The first test that succeeds causes the file type to be printed.
The type printed will usually contain one of the words text (the file contains only printing characters and a few common control characters and is probably safe to read on an ASCII terminal), executable (the file contains the result of compiling a program in a form understandable to some UNIX kernel or another), or data meaning anything else (data is usually “binary” or non-printable). Exceptions are well-known file formats (core files, tar archives) that are known to contain binary data. When modifying magic files or the program itself, make sure to preserve these keywords. Users depend on knowing that all the readable files in a directory have the word “text” printed. Don't do as Berkeley did and change “shell commands text” to “shell script”.
The filesystem tests are based on examining the return from a stat(2) system call. The program checks to see if the file is empty, or if it's some sort of special file. Any known file types appropriate to the system you are running on (sockets, symbolic links, or named pipes (FIFOs) on those systems that implement them) are intuited if they are defined in the system header file <sys/stat.h>.
The magic tests are used to check for files with data in particular fixed formats. The canonical example of this is a binary executable (compiled program) a.out file, whose format is defined in <elf.h>, <a.out.h> and possibly <exec.h> in the standard include directory. These files have a “magic number” stored in a particular place near the beginning of the file that tells the UNIX operating system that the file is a binary executable, and which of several types thereof. The concept of a “magic number” has been applied by extension to data files. Any file with some invariant identifier at a small fixed offset into the file can usually be described in this way. The information identifying these files is read from /etc/magic and the compiled magic file /usr/share/misc/magic.mgc, or the files in the directory /usr/share/misc/magic if the compiled file does not exist. In addition, if $HOME/.magic.mgc or $HOME/.magic exists, it will be used in preference to the system magic files.
If a file does not match any of the entries in the magic file, it is examined to see if it seems to be a text file. ASCII, ISO-8859-x, non-ISO 8-bit extended-ASCII character sets (such as those used on Macintosh and IBM PC systems), UTF-8-encoded Unicode, UTF-16-encoded Unicode, and EBCDIC character sets can be distinguished by the different ranges and sequences of bytes that constitute printable text in each set. If a file passes any of these tests, its character set is reported. ASCII, ISO-8859-x, UTF-8, and extended-ASCII files are identified as “text” because they will be mostly readable on nearly any terminal; UTF-16 and EBCDIC are only “character data” because, while they contain text, it is text that will require translation before it can be read. In addition, file will attempt to determine other characteristics of text-type files. If the lines of a file are terminated by CR, CRLF, or NEL, instead of the Unix-standard LF, this will be reported. Files that contain embedded escape sequences or overstriking will also be identified.
Once file has determined the character set used in a text-type file, it will attempt to determine in what language the file is written. The language tests look for particular strings (cf. <names.h>) that can appear anywhere in the first few blocks of a file. For example, the keyword .br indicates that the file is most likely a troff(1) input file, just as the keyword struct indicates a C program. These tests are less reliable than the previous two groups, so they are performed last. The language test routines also test for some miscellany (such as tar(1) archives, JSON files).
Any file that cannot be identified as having been written in any of the character sets listed above is simply said to be “data”.
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.
Do not prepend filenames to output lines (brief mode).
Write a magic.mgc output file that contains a pre-parsed version of the magic file or directory.
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.
Prints internal debugging information to stderr.
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.
Exclude the test named in testname from the list of tests made to determine the file type. Valid test names are:
Like --exclude but ignore tests that file does not know about. This is intended for compatibility with older versions of file.
Print a slash-separated list of valid extensions for the file type found.
Use the specified string as the separator between the filename and the file result returned. Defaults to ‘:’.
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 @”.
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.
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”.
Like -i, but print only the specified element(s).
Don't stop at the first match, keep going. Subsequent matches will be have the string ‘\012- ’ prepended. (If you want a newline, see the -r option.) The magic pattern with the highest strength (see the -l option) comes first.
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).
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.
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.
Don't pad filenames so that they align in the output.
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.
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.
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 |
Don't translate unprintable characters to \ooo. Normally file translates unprintable characters to their octal representation.
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.
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.
Note: This Debian version of file was built without seccomp support, so this option has no effect.
Print the version of the program and exit.
Try to look inside compressed files.
Try to look inside compressed files, but report information about the contents only not the compression.
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.
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.
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:
$ 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-filehexdump(1), od(1), strings(1), magic(5)
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 documentin an existing magic file would have to be changed to
0 string \\begindata Andrew Toolkit documentSunOS 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 long&0x7fffffff >0 not strippedOn systems where libseccomp (https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp) is available, file enforces limiting system calls to only the ones necessary for the operation of the program. This enforcement does not provide any security benefit when file is asked to decompress input files running external programs with the -z option. To enable execution of external decompressors, one needs to disable sandboxing using the -S option.
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.
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 AT 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 AT warwick.uk>, 1989.
Guy Harris, <guy AT netapp.com>, made many changes from 1993 to the present.
Primary development and maintenance from 1990 to the present by Christos Zoulas <christos AT astron.com>.
Altered by Chris Lowth <chris AT 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 AT pobox.com>, July, 2000, to identify character codes and attempt to identify the languages of non-ASCII files.
Altered by Reuben Thomas <rrt AT 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.
Copyright (c) Ian F. Darwin, Toronto, Canada, 1986-1999. Covered by the standard Berkeley Software Distribution copyright; see the file COPYING in the source distribution.
The files tar.h and is_tar.c were written by John Gilmore from his public-domain tar(1) program, and are not covered by the above license.
Please report bugs and send patches to the bug tracker at https://bugs.astron.com/ or the mailing list at <file AT astron.com> (visit https://mailman.astron.com/mailman/listinfo/file first to subscribe).
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.
BSD February 5, 2021 BSD
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