Determine file type in Ruby

Question

How does one reliably determine a file\'s type? File extension analysis is not acceptable. There must be a rubyesque tool similar to the UNIX file(1) comman

Answer 1

If you're on a Unix machine try this:

mimetype = `file -Ib #{path}`.gsub(/\n/,"")

I'm not aware of any pure Ruby solutions that work as reliably as 'file'.

Edited to add: depending what OS you are running you may need to use 'i' instead of 'I' to get file to return a mime-type.