Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Detecting type of file in a program
Message-ID: <9587@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 4 Feb 89 07:45:30 GMT
References: <192@henry.ece.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 9

In article <192@henry.ece.utexas.edu> po@volta.ece.utexas.edu () writes:
>How can I tell whether a file is text or an object file ?
>Is there a better way than using :
>	system("file filename > /tmp/tempfile")

Anything you do will be pretty much what "file" does,
namely, inspect yay many bytes of the file to see if there is a
known "magic number" header present or if there are non-diplayable
byte values present.