1LibMagic(3)           User Contributed Perl Documentation          LibMagic(3)
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NAME

6       File::LibMagic - Perlwrapper for libmagic (file-4.x or file-5.x)
7

SYNOPSIS

9       The easy way:
10
11                 use File::LibMagic ':easy';
12
13                 print MagicBuffer("Hello World\n"),"\n";
14                 # returns "ASCII text"
15
16                 print MagicFile("/bin/ls"),"\n";
17                 # returns "ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV)"
18                 # on my system
19
20       To use all capabilities of libmagic use
21
22                 use File::LibMagic ':complete';
23
24                 my $handle=magic_open(0);
25                 my $ret   =magic_load($handle,"");  # use default magic file
26                 # OR $ret =magic_load($handle, '/home/someone/.magic');
27
28                 print magic_buffer($handle,"Hello World\n"),"\n";
29                 print magic_file($handle,"/bin/ls"),"\n";
30
31                 magic_close($handle);
32
33       Using the object-oriented interface:
34
35           use File::LibMagic;
36
37           my $flm = File::LibMagic->new();
38
39           # determine a content description
40           print $flm->describe_filename('path/to/file');
41           print $flm->describe_contents('this is some data');
42
43           # determine the MIME type
44           print $flm->checktype_filename('path/to/file');
45           print $flm->checktype_contents('this is some data');
46
47       Please have a look at the files in the example-directory.
48

ABSTRACT

50       The "File::LibMagic" is a simple perl interface to libmagic from the
51       file-4.x or file-5.x package from Christos Zoulas
52       (ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/).
53

DESCRIPTION

55       The "File::LibMagic" is a simple perlinterface to libmagic from the
56       file-4.x or file-5.x package from Christos Zoulas
57       (ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/).
58
59       You can use the simple Interface like MagicBuffer() or MagicFile(), use
60       the functions of libmagic(3) or use the OO-Interface.
61
62   Simple Interface
63       MagicBuffer()
64
65       fixme
66
67       MagicFile()
68
69       fixme
70
71   libmagic(3)
72       magic_open, magic_close, magic_error, magic_file, magic_buffer,
73       magic_setflags, magic_check, magic_compile, magic_load -- Magic number
74       recognition library
75
76   OO-Interface
77       new
78
79       Create a new File::LibMagic object to use for determining the type or
80       MIME type of content.
81
82       Using the object oriented interface provides an efficient way to
83       repeatedly determine the magic of a file.  Using the object oriented
84       interface provides significant performance improvements over using the
85       ":easy" interface when testing many files.  This performance
86       improvement is because the loading of the magic database happens only
87       once, during object creation.
88
89       Each File::LibMagic object loads the magic database independently of
90       other File::LibMagic objects.
91
92       checktype_contents
93
94       Returns the MIME type of the data given as the first argument.
95
96       checktype_filename
97
98       Returns the MIME type of the given file.  This will be the same as
99       returned by the "file -i" command.
100
101       describe_contents
102
103       Returns a description of the data given as the first argument.
104
105       describe_filename
106
107       Returns the MIME type of the given file.  This will be the same as
108       returned by the "file" command.
109
110   EXPORT
111       None by default.
112

DIAGNOSTICS

114   MagicBuffer requires defined content
115       This exception is thrown if "MagicBuffer" is called with an undefined
116       argument.
117
118   libmagic cannot open %s
119       If libmagic is unable to open the file for which you want to determine
120       the type, this exception is thrown.  The exception can be thrown by
121       "MagicFile" or "magic_file".  '%s' contains details about why libmagic
122       was unable to open the file.
123
124       This exception is only thrown when using libmagic version 4.17 or
125       later.
126
127   libmagic could not find any magic files
128       If libmagic is unable to find a suitable database of magic definitions,
129       this exception is thrown.  The exception can be thrown by
130       "MagicBuffer", "MagicFile" or "magic_load".
131
132       With "magic_load", you can specify the location of the magic database
133       with the second argument.  Depending on your libmagic implementation,
134       you can often set the MAGIC environment variable to tell libmagic where
135       to find the correct magic database.
136
137   libmagic out of memory
138       If libmagic is unable to allocate enough memory for its internal data
139       structures, this exception is thrown.  The exception can be thrown by
140       "MagicBuffer", "MagicFile" or "magic_open".
141
142   magic_file requires a filename
143       If "magic_file" is called with an undefined second argument, this
144       exception is thrown.
145

BUGS

147       "normalisation"-problem:
148        The results from libmagic are dependend on the (linux) distribution
149        being used.  A Gentoo-Linux might return "text/plain;
150        charset=us-asci", an OpenSUSE "text/plain charset=us-asci" (no
151        semicolon!). Please check this if you run your project on a different
152        platform (and send me an mail if you see different
153        outputs/return-values).
154
155       I'm still learning perlxs ...
156       still no real error handling (printf is not enough)
157

DEPENDENCIES/PREREQUISITES

159       This module requires these other modules and libraries:
160
161         o) file-4.x or file-5x and the associated libmagic
162               (ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/)
163         o) on some systems zlib is required.
164

166       I created File::LibMagic because I wanted to use libmagic (from
167       file-4.x) and the otherwise great Module File::MMagic only works with
168       file-3.x. In file-3.x exists no libmagic but an ascii file (/etc/magic)
169       in which all data (magic numbers, etc.) is included. File::MMagic
170       parsed this ascii file at each request and is thus releativly slow.
171       Also it can not use the new data from file-4.x or file-5.x.
172
173       File::MimeInfo::Magic uses the magic file from freedesktop which is
174       encoded completely in XML, and thus not the fastest approach (
175         http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-December/msg00260.html
176       ).
177
178       File::Type uses a relativly small magic file, which is directly hacked
179       into the module code. Thus it is quite fast. It is also mod_perl save.
180       It may be the right choice for you, but the databasis is quite small
181       relative to the file-package.
182

HISTORY

184       April 2004 initial Release
185
186       April 2005 version 0.81
187
188       Thanks to James Olin Oden (joden@lee.k12.nc.us) for his help.  Thanks
189       to Nathan Hawkins <utsl@quic.net> for his port to 64-bit systems.
190
191       June 2006 version 0.8x (x>1) Michael Hendricks started to put a lot of
192       work into File::LibMagic.
193
194       May 2009 latest relase.
195

AUTHOR

197       Andreas Fitzner <fitzner@informatik.hu-berlin.de>, Michael Hendricks
198       <michael@ndrix.org>
199

201       Copyright 200[5-9] by Andreas Fitzner, Michael Hendricks
202
203       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
204       under the same terms as Perl itself.
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208perl v5.12.2                      2009-05-23                       LibMagic(3)
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