file VS magika

https://www.darwinsys.com/file/

This is the authors website. Apparently yeah its not part of GNU utils, I had no idea, I knew it came with most Linux systems so I looked for the Debian package and found the site linked above.

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/file

https://github.com/file/file/blob/master/magic/Magdir/gentoo https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/vnd.gentoo.ebuild (among others)

Look into libmagic.

in installations of Linux, file is a command to retrieve some basic information about a file type. Because contrasting to the organization of Windows, the file extension in Linux can be less important for the file's use (even irrelevant), than the actual content.

In this case, it's hitting this set of rules. I would guess it hits both class and public.

But I don't think this is what you meant. I think your question is something more like: how many file formats are there? The Unix file command recognizes several thousand, and Wikipedia has a list. Of course these are only the most common, and it's hard to delineate what counts as a unique file format. (Is YAML one file format or millions?)

The magic number for all ogg files is the same (OggS) and files magic file looks like it decides the mime type based on the codecs used in the file. However, it looks like application/ogg is used only if the file contains Kate (Karaoke and Text) content.

Also the magic number database for guessing the format of a file:

https://www.darwinsys.com/file/

As someone that has worked in a space that has to deal with uploaded files for the last few years, and someone who maintains a WASM libmagic Node package ( https://github.com/moshen/wasmagic ) , I have to say I really love seeing new entries into the file type detection space.

Though I have to say when looking at the Node module, I don't understand why they released it.

Their docs say it's slow:

https://github.com/google/magika/blob/120205323e260dad4e5877...

It loads the model an runtime:

https://github.com/google/magika/blob/120205323e260dad4e5877...

They mark it as Experimental in the documentation, but it seems like it was just made for the web demo.

Also as others have mentioned. The model appears to only detect 116 file types:

https://github.com/google/magika/blob/120205323e260dad4e5877...

Where libmagic detects... a lot. Over 1600 last time I checked:

https://github.com/file/file/tree/4cbd5c8f0851201d203755b76c...

I guess I'm confused by this release. Sure it detected most of my list of sample files, but in a sample set of 4 zip files, it misidentified one.

We are very excited to announce the release of Magika our AI powered fast and efficient file type identification lib and tool - https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/02/magika-ai-powered-fast-and-efficient-file-type-identification.html

Thanks to its optimized Keras model, large scale training dataset, and Onnx Magika massively outperform other file identification tools while be very fast even on CPU.

Magika python code and model is open sourced on Github: https://github.com/google/magika and we also provide an experimental TFJS based npm package https://www.npmjs.com/package/magika

With the team we hope you will find Magika useful for your own projects. Let us know what you think or if you have any question!