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
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with jQuery

    A few days back I debuted a sweet article that made use of MooTools JavaScript and opacity to show focus on a specified element. Here's how to accomplish that feat using jQuery. The jQuery JavaScript There you have it. Opacity is a very simple but effective...

  • By
    MooTools: Set Style Per Media

    I'd bet one of the most used MooTools methods is the setStyle() method, which allows you to set CSS style declarations for an element. One of the limitations of MooTools' setStyle() method is that it sets the specific style for all medias.

Discussion

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