Find File type unix

Question

How to find the type of the file? I am writing a code to find that file on unix system is image file or not?

Possibilities exists that someone has changed the extension.

Thanks in advance.

Maybe a duplicate of this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1915317/howto-extract-mimetype-from-a-byte — Martin Atkins, Mar 17 '13 at 05:59
`ImageIO.read(..)` is a good way to test if a chunk of bytes represents an image (as understood by J2SE). — Andrew Thompson, Mar 17 '13 at 06:03
@Martin, unlikely, that's for a mime type, which is generally a file being downloaded. MIME types aren't usually stored alongside arbitrary files on UNIX filesystems. — paxdiablo, Mar 17 '13 at 06:03
Well, MIME types are one way to describe the type of a file that happens to be pretty standard. Ultimately that question is about using magic numbers at the beginning of a file to determine file type, which is really the only way to heuristically detect file type from raw file contents with no additional context. — Martin Atkins, Mar 17 '13 at 17:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 17 '13 at 06:00

1

Use the file command:

file <name of file>

answered Mar 17 '13 at 06:00

erlandsson

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '13 at 06:06

0

Java 7 has Files.probeContentType(Path path) which probes the content type of a file. See API for details.

answered Mar 17 '13 at 06:06

Evgeniy Dorofeev

2 Answers2