Get File MIME Type from Command Line

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS

    One of the website features my customers love to provider their web users is an online dynamic calendar. An online calendar can be used for events, upcoming product specials, memos, and anything else you can think of. I've taken some time to completely...

  • By
    Scrolling “Agree to Terms” Component with MooTools ScrollSpy

    Remember the good old days of Windows applications forcing you to scroll down to the bottom of the "terms and conditions" pane, theoretically in an effort ensure that you actually read them? You're saying "No David, don't do it." Too late -- I've done...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!