Get File MIME Type from Command Line
I've gotten skilled at shell scripting over the years. I love a good GUI but knowing how to automate makes you a much more powerful engineer. Much of my scripting requires recursing over directories and processing a file if it meets a given criteria, which is often file extension or MIME type.
You can use the following shell command to get a file's MIME type:
file --mime-type -b Downloads/main.js
# text/plain
file --mime-type -b Downloads/logo.jpg
# image/jpeg
It's important to use the brief (-b) option in the command or you may receive an error message.
MIME type is used for validation and any number of other informational use cases. Luckily the file command and and a flag is all you need!
![Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations]()
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
![39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla]()
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
![CSS Vertical Centering]()
Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...
![Multiple Backgrounds with CSS]()
Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came...
