Tuesday, March 4, 2014

How to find the MIME type of a file

Some MIME types can be intuitive - application/pdf for PDF files. However, not all MIME types are that easy to get exactly right - application/vnd.ms-excel for xls or Excel files.

The following are different ways, using the command line, to identify the MIME type of a file.

  • xdg-mime
    $ xdg-mime query filetype somefile.xls
    application/vnd.ms-excel
    
  • file
    $ file -b --mime-type somefile.xls
    application/vnd.ms-excel
    
  • gvfs-info
    $ gvfs-info -a standard::content-type somefile.xls
    attributes:
      standard::content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel
    

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