From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-10-11T04:19:49+09:00
Subject: Re: equivalent of unix "file <filename>" in ruby?

On 10/10/06, khaines@enigo.com <khaines@enigo.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Ruby Rails wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I'm trying to find out what is the equivalent of file <filename> 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 Users' 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
-- 
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