[Gutsy]Looking for a program that analyzes a file and makes a "best guess" attempt to identify or provide information

[Felipe Figueiredo]

Em Thursday 27 December 2007 15:24:11 John Toliver escreveu:
> Does a program exist which you can call, then point to a specific
> file, and then makes an attempt at analyzing what the file is?
> Searching in synaptic reveals many very specific analyzers, primarily
> for things like log files, or packet analyzers etc.  What I would
> like, is a CLI program (no need for gui) I can script and add to my
> context menu so that when I encounter a file I don't recognize I can
> simply right click and say "analyze file", and the system will tell me
> what it can about the file.
> 
> If my approach is wrong, how does one go about analyzing files when
> they don't know what they are?
> 

It really depends on what you mean by 'analyse' the file. Do you intend to 
actually screen the file content's, to discover something specific on that 
file? If you only want a generic description of "file type", based on a mime 
list, Corey' s suggestion (the 'file' command) should do.

If not, maybe you can be more specific on what kind of information your script 
expects.

regards
FF