Michael Haardt wrote:
> Since a long time, there is a portable and free implementation:
>
> ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/
>
> It is a great program and it comes with a really huge magic file. The
> author was very responsive when I sent him patches long time ago and
> it looks like there are still updates from time to time. The program
> is structured as a libmagic.a with a small front end, so applications
> can use magic number detection easily. This is the program you will
> very likely find on Linux systems.
Yep, that's the version I have on my system even (my own distribution),
although I guess I didn't partake in the shared library feature because I
don't seem to have any libmagic on my system that I can find. This version
of file is maintained though - currently at 4.07 (stable) that I know of
which was announced (on freshmeat.net) just about 1 month ago.
However, there are quite a few "bugs" that are mentioned in the man pages I
have (although mine are from version 3.9something) that lean in the
direction of getting out of the mess they're in with the magic file they
have currently. So in that regard, maybe it's not such a great idea to add
on to the pile!
Eli.
