Taking Stock

Imagine you have a directory with hundreds or even thousands of files (without uniform extensions) that you want to organize. Or maybe you want to know the last access date of a file for backup, forensics, or version management purposes.

Instead of tediously clicking your way through the files in a graphical file manager, a shell script with the test command can help identify filesystem objects as well as provide additional information about the files.

Determining File Type

The file command provides information about a file's contents (Figure 1). Because it tests for patterns in the content, file cannot be misled by file extensions (Figure 2).

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