Programming

Hi Everyone!

I am working on a c program which displays all the directories and files under each directory.
I want to know what kind of file each is. Like, is the file an ascii text file or english text or a c file.
if it is an executable, is it an binary file or a shell script.
I was told to look inside the file to achieve this.
Is there any unix utility to do this?what function can I use to achive this.Thank you for any kind of help .

Hey dude ,

You can just use file <file> command dude .

you can use it from C , with system(" file <file>");

Let's say , you got some files :

ok.c exe ..

you make the code , with system("file <file>"); or you use file <file> command withing shell script :

you should get something like :

Code:

exe: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
file.c : ex.c: ASCII C program text

Hi !_30!

Thank you! Ur suggetion was very much helpful.
But I just want the message like ascii text or english text.How can I do that?
Is the returned value a string or what?
Can u give me a more detailed example.

ps:Thanks.I think u r really smart.U reply to most of my questions.
Thanks anyway.

General questions about the command 'file' are best answered by looking at 'man file'. Yes, it prints human-readable strings.

Like , it was saied , all you can find it's in man file

You can see there a lot of option's .. No the result is not a string , but I can say to you that is inspired from :

/usr/share/misc/file/magic.mime


If you want just a part of that message to be shown , you can just copy a part of it with ( STRNCPY(string,initial_string+x,y) ) from it ..

Thank you, everyone.
Pardon me for my dumb questions.
Can u please tell me whether the filename specified in system("file <file>") should be a constant or can it be a variable too?
Because, the file name is in a variable dirt and it changes for every iteration in the loop.
Thanks again.

The system function doesn't care whether it's given a constant or not. Beyond that I'm not sure what you're asking.