Re: Determine mime type of a file

[Justin Cormack <justin@...>]

On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 11:32 +0200, Marco wrote:
> On 2011-05-02 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Marco <netuse@lavabit.com> wrote:
> > > How can I determine the mime  type of a file (like the
> > > unix
> > > command “file -i <some_file>”)?
> > 
> > Why not just this? ;)
> > 
> > local type = io.popen('file -i '..myfile):read()
> 
> I thought there  may be a more portable  solution. I think
> file -i breaks on non-unix systems.
> 
> > Otherwise, you need a catalog,  and that is dependent on
> > system  setup on  something like  Gnome, which  provides
> > such a thing helpfully encoded as XML.
> 
> What do you mean by catalog?  A file extension - mime type
> mapping?  That would  quickly  break when  a  file has  no
> extension (file -i is not confused by this).

There is a port of file for windows if you need it
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/file.htm

Also worth noting that the file command uses libmagic, you could write a
direct Lua binding to the library. But it is a unixy way of doing
things, Windows does prefer to use extensions.

Justin