I thought that the command lsattrib would display all this information, but apparently no such command or utility exists. Is there something that will display all the information about a file, going beyond the ls -l command?'stat' (in the stat package) shows you all the metadata. 'ls' can be persuaded to show you pretty much all of that by using various options.
The lsattr command is probably what you were thinking of, Haines. But it doesn't do what you want :-(There is no information about file type in the file system. It is usually embedded at the start of the file according to various conventions. Try searching for 'magic cookies', for example, or reading the XML spec ;-|. As Colin says, programs use various methods to decide what is embedded in a particular file.
Cheers, Dave