NAME

File::Magic - Perl extension for embedding file(1)'s libmagic

SYNOPSIS

use File::Magic;
my $magic => File::Magic->new( [ '/path/to/personal/magic' [, flags ] ] );
my $filetype = $magic->type( File::Spec->catfile( qw(path to file) );
unless( defined( $filetype ) )
{
    croak( $magic->errmsg() );
}
print( "$filetype\n" );

DESCRIPTION

This module covers simply getting the file type by using magic_file from libmagic(3) from Ian F. Darwin, Måns Rullgård and Christos Zoulas. The main improvement is no fork(2) is required to get the type of a file and an impressive speed improvement come with that when a lot of files needs to be typed ;-)

EXPORT

None.

FUNCTIONS

new

File::Magic-new()> instantiates a new object of File::Magic. It creates a new instance within libmagic. Any further calls via this object will have the same magic file and the same flags.

type

Returns the "magic" type of the specified file or sprintf( "%s: %s", $filename, strerror( $! ) ); If an internal error within libmagic happens, undef is returned.

errmsg

If - and only if - an error happened within libmagic, the method returns the corrresponding error string.

SEE ALSO

See file(1) and libmagic(3). If your system doesn't contain a compatible file command, see ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/.

AUTHOR

Jens Rehsack <rehsack@web.de>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2008 by Jens Rehsack

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.