file

does not prepend filenames to output lines.

causes a checking printout of the parsed form of the magic file. This is usually used in conjunction with -m to debug a new magic file before installing it.

reads the names of the files to be examined from namefile (one per line) before the argument list. Either namefile or at least one filename argument must be present; to test the standard input, use `-' as a filename argument.

causes the file command to output mime type strings rather than the more traditional human-readable ones. Thus, it may say `text/plain; charset=us-ascii' rather than `ASCII text'. In order for this option to work, file changes the way it handles files recognized by the command itself (such as many of the text file types, directories, etc.), and makes use of an alternative `magic' file.

does not stop at the first match, keeps going.

specifies an alternate list of files containing magic numbers. This can be a single file, or a colon-separated list of files.

forces stdout to be flushed after checking each file. This is only useful if checking a list of files. It is intended to be used by programs that want filetype output from a pipe.

tries to look inside compressed files.

causes symlinks to be followed.

causes block or character special files (that are potentially problematic when processed by file) to be read in addition to the argument files ordinarily identified by stat(2). This is useful for determining the filesystem types of the data in raw disk partitions, which are block special files. This option also causes file to disregard the file size as reported by stat(2) since on some systems it reports a zero size for raw disk partitions.