Question

I’m writing a program in C, and I need to known the mime-type of a file.

I have yet searched with Google, and I found that I must include the ‘file’ UNIX utility in my project.

The source code of file need configure and make. How I can include this in my project? Do I have to crop a part of the source code into a new file.c and file.h?

Answer 1

Do you want to guess the MIME type based on the extension, or do something like file and examine the headers?

To get functionality similar to file, you don’t need to include file in your project. Instead, you’ll want to use libmagic which file is based on. Unfortunately I’m not aware of a good source of documentation for this, but it’s pretty straightforward.

magic_t magic = magic_open(MAGIC_MIME_TYPE);
magic_load(magic, NULL);
char *mime_type = magic_file(magic, "/path/to/file");
magic_close(magic);