Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Detecting type of file in a program
Message-ID: <944@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 7 Feb 89 06:08:23 GMT
References: <192@henry.ece.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 18

In article <192@henry.ece.utexas.edu> po@volta.ece.utexas.edu () writes:
|In my program, I am using opendir() to read in the names of 
|text files from a directory.
|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")

Since Unix does not have the notion of a file type (at least not like
V..) you'll end up doing something equivalent to what 'file' does.
Using file perhaps enhances portability.

Try as a variant:
  pp = popen("exec file filename","r");
to get the lines of 'file' into your program (and use 'pclose', not
'fclose' to close the stream). You can even grep for 'text' in the 
output from file.

     Leo.