Lisi wrote: > Thanks, Andy - yes, it told me what the files were, and its best guess was > good. (I should know - I created the files!) > > But no actual magic numbers. :-( Help us out. Can you phrase an example of what you want? Otherwise the only magic number anyone can give you is 42. "Magic" is relative here. The file program simply looks at parts here and parts there of the file and then makes a best-guess about it. The magic file database in libmagic1 is a documentation of that best guess effort. See the man page for information about the format of the information there. man magic So for example most files don't have a single magic number. Most types of files have many possible combinations. And when files are layered it is more difficult such as a tar of script, or a gzip'd file that is a tar of a script. The file program will quickly try to undo those layers and make a guess. It isn't perfect. Since the file program tries to work across any possibility in the universe it has a very hard task. If you have a more restricted set of input files you might be able to do better. For example '#!/' and #! /' denote scripts. Any file that starts with the binary data 23 21 20 2f or 23 21 2f is almost certainly a shell script. What type? For that you need to look further and see what characters follow. Note that in Squeeze /usr/share/misc/magic is now an empty directory instead of a file. The source isn't installed anymore. That is a shame. For squeeze you will need to install the source package to get to raw data that you can look at. apt-get source libmagic1 cd file-5.04 ls -log magic/Magdir/ Bob
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