determine file type

[Mark Gibson]

Is there an equivalent to the unix 'file' command?

[mark tmp]$ file min.txt
min.txt: ASCII text
[mark tmp]$ file trunk
trunk: directory
[mark tmp]$ file compliance.tgz
compliance.tgz: gzip compressed data, from Unix

What I really want to do is determine if a file is 1) a directory, 2) a
text file 3) a binary file.

Is there a way to do this?

Mark

[James Stroud]

Mark Gibson wrote:

Is there an equivalent to the unix 'file' command?

[mark tmp]$ file min.txt
min.txt: ASCII text
[mark tmp]$ file trunk
trunk: directory
[mark tmp]$ file compliance.tgz
compliance.tgz: gzip compressed data, from Unix

What I really want to do is determine if a file is 1) a directory, 2) a
text file 3) a binary file.

Is there a way to do this?

Mark

import os
def test_file(filename, maxread=1024):
if os.path.isdir(filename):
return 'directory'
afile = open(filename) # open as text
for achar in afile.read(maxread):
if ord(achar) > 127:
return 'binary'
return 'text'
James

--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/

[Mark Gibson]

import os
def test_file(filename, maxread=1024):
if os.path.isdir(filename):
return 'directory'
afile = open(filename) # open as text
for achar in afile.read(maxread):
if ord(achar) > 127:
return 'binary'
return 'text'

Pefect, thanks!

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:52:32 -0700, Mark Gibson wrote:

import os
def test_file(filename, maxread=1024):
if os.path.isdir(filename):
return 'directory'
afile = open(filename) # open as text
for achar in afile.read(maxread):
if ord(achar) > 127:
return 'binary'
return 'text'

Pefect, thanks!

Not only is it not perfect, as given it isn't even correct.

open("lots_of_nulls.bin", "w").write("\0" * 1024)
test_file("lots_of_nulls.bin")

'text'

However, with a more careful algorithm for deciding what's text and what's
not, the general approach is fine.
--
Steven.