mimemagic VS file

If you're curious, here's how I solved it for ruby back in the day. Still used magic bytes, but added an overlay on top of the freedesktop.org DB: https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/20

Get it directly from github commit.

[AO3-6152] - Due to a licensing incident with a Rails dependency known as mimemagic, we had to update Rails to 5.2.5 and mimemagic to 0.3.6.

I don't think mimemagic works on Windows after the drama. I opened a PR for that a month ago but no one seems to care: https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/141

"License, motherfucker"

I know the vulgarity of the statements is tongue in cheek, but this one has been reinforced lately by the "MIME Magic" debacle[1], mama mia.

[1] https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/issues/98

it has a licensing issue

https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/commit/749a7e59de480b7c0373acc4f8ceb4444352ba46#diff-2ea7e2364883967953ab518a8316b639e612b8a6f20eadb7b97939d91c8e2612

On the other hand mimemagic provides by_magic https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic#usage which does detection by heuristic. It's a radically different method for a radically different use case.

Anyway, I created a PR addressing new Mimemagic not working on Windows https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/141

Someone broke the internet for rails https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/issues/98

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/