Re: recognizing a file by scanning it

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
() Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:06:42 +0900

   file(1) contains a rather complete set of such heuristics and
   has been stable for a long time.  AFAIK libmagic is free and
   GPL-compatible.

Yes, i believe so.  My concern w/ using libmagic would be
portability, and handling the case where libmagic is not
available.  I envision the feature to be non-optional.

   Also, it might be nice if you could call this facility from
   coding systems (after all, what else is a BOM but file magic?)
   This kind of thing really doesn't need to be in Lisp, and might
   benefit from being in C.

Certainly, in C it can be much faster.  

thi