Python analog for linux "file" command
file, linux, python
Solution
you need to check the "magic" byte of the file, and I was about to tell you about:
- python-magic
when it occured to me that this question should already have been answered on SO, and it has.
N.B.: I'm not listing `pymagic` as the other post does, as it did not get any update since `0.1` which looks quite old (even the source website is down).
for OSX:
brew install libmagic
pip install python-magic
python
>>> magic.from_file('test.py')
'Python script, ASCII text executable'
Problem
I'm looking for `file` linux command analog made in Python. It should provide information about file type as described in `man file`. Minimal feature set I'm looking for is to determine if file is raw or text (human-readable) one. Wrapper library will be good suggestion. I know, I can run `file` as subprocess and grab it's output to determine file type. But my program is supposed to parse thousands of files and I'm afraid of very long execution time in this case.