Hi
I run on a Unix webserver at my university. I have a couple of *.inc files which are include files used for php.

They are all in one folder without an index file. If you go to the folder, you get to see a list of files in that dir.

Some of the .inc have a question mark icon next to it. others have a text icon next to it. I do not know why? They are the same extensions.

All have html tags inside. If you go to each one in a web browser, some files will display as html by the browser. others will display it as text.

Is there a reason behind this due to content type? if so, how do i change it?
Also, i connect using telnet or SSH. if i run ls, some files have an asterisk next to the name. Why is that?

Your school's Apache probably have mod_mime_magic enabled.

Apache's usual way to determine the icon used on an directory index is by the MIME type of the file (a few others by name). In turn, MIME type are defined by extension (either from AddType directives or mime.types as system default). So the way the icon is determined should be relatively "consistent".

If mime-magic is enabled, it will try to scan the first few bytes of the file in question, in the same way you do it with a file(1) command to determine the type. It matches according to a set of preset signature in a magic file. So, extension is not important if this extension is enabled, so multiple files with same extension may come up with different icons, depending on what is contained in the first few bytes of the file.

Thanks for the answer,
Now i need to know if there is a unix command that i can run that could manually change the mime-type of the file.

The other question is why is there an asterisk next to the filename.

You just change the configuration files in Apache to affect Apache. I see no reason to change the system magic file signature as the two are separate.

Please search the Web for more information about this, in particular look for the keywords I used in the previous post.