Unlike some popular operating systems you might know of, Linux is clever enough to actually look inside the contents of a file and not just its extension (if any) to work out what type a file is.
This functionality isn't just hidden away - if you want to quickly peek at a file's type, or you have a binary file that you want to try and identify, you can use the command line tool file to use this same technology to discover a filetype.
It is frighteningly simple to use - simply give file the location of the target file to test. For example:
$ file /bin/bash
In this case, we're examining /bin/bash, which we already know is an executable file. On my system, the result looks like this:
/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
As you can see - wherever possible, file will give detailed information. For example, here I check out a PNG image:
$ file cygwin.png
cygwin.png: PNG image data, 207 x 207, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
And a PDF:
$ file Silent.pdf
Silent.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
This method isn't perfect and there are occasions when it can incorrectly identify files (for example, it can't work out what OpenDocument files are as they are also completely valid Zip archives), so don't rely on it for critical things.
If you want to quickly discover a filetype and you're already in the command line however, file is a very useful tool which should be in your CLI toolkit!
By reader demand, we're providing the Glossy theme shown in the last post. Click the image below for a preview.
This theme was extracted from a GNOME 2.19.90 (2.20 beta) install.
It may or may not be finished, but we're providing it here by demand.
Just drop this folder (once extracted) into your ~/.themes directory. Enjoy!
All credits go to the GNOME project, and none to FOSSwire.
We are merely providing a preview download for those who want to try it.
Be sure to check out the final release of GNOME 2.20 as it comes September 19th!
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointNineteen
http://www.gnome.org/
Download
GNOME, the most popular desktop environment for Linux, is ten years old today! The GNU Network Object Model Environment (although not often referred to as that anymore) was originally announced as a project to build a graphical environment based entirely on free and open source software.
At the time, rival environment KDE wasn't completely free and was frowned upon by the FSF because the underlying toolkit it runs on Qt, wasn't open source at the time. Here's an extract from the original announcement email:
* Goals
We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based
entirely on free software:
- We want the applications to have a common look and feel, and
to share as many visual elements and UI concepts as possible.
- We want to use the GTK toolkit as our toolkit for writing
the applications.
The GTK toolkit (http://www.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/gtk and
http://levien.com/~slow/gtk/) is the toolkit written by
Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball, Josh MacDonald, for the GNU
Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) project
(http://scam.xcf.berkeley.edu/~gimp).
- We want to encourage people to contribute code and to test
the code, so that the software will compile out of the box
by using GNU's tools for automatic source configuration.
OSNews links to two pictures of GNOME - one back from 1997 and a recent one, and it really does show you how far the project has come.
So, here's to the future of GNOME!
[thanks to Jack Dunford for the tip]
