Alright, so I am trying to use perl (or any other shell scripting language, awk/sed/bash for instance), to retrieve the mime-type of a file.

I want to keep it in one file, and most of the modules that are on cpan that check for mime types (Magic), aren't installed on these boxes.

Anyone have a good way of checking for a file's mime type?

If you have the .pm file for mime type checking (for example like Lite.pm for mime::lite)
you do not necessarily have to "install" the module. Just put it in your directory on the machine you are using, say /home/Rhije/Lite.pm

and add this to the shebang in the top of your own perl code
This may not always work, but mime content-type checking is reasonably complex, so it is definitely worth a try. Rather than rolling your own. You can pack the two files in a tarball, extract them and run the perl. I know it violates your "one file" request.

Sorry, not sure if I called it the correct thing. I meant the content type, such as image/*

I am trying to find what type of file it is, image, video, script, etc..