Why doesn't file detect the mime-type of mp3 properly?

Posted by Grumbel on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Grumbel
Published on 2011-10-30T18:37:59Z Indexed on 2012/04/03 23:41 UTC
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files

Something odd I recently encountered, running file --mime-type on a collection of MP3 gets the mime-time wrong a third of the time:

$ for i in */*.mp3; do cat "$i"| file --mime-type -; done  | sort  | uniq -c
140 /dev/stdin: application/octet-stream
309 /dev/stdin: audio/mpeg

There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason, as even MP3s from the same source, will sometimes fail and sometimes not.

Bug, feature or anything obvious I am missing here?

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Developer IT

Why doesn't file detect the mime-type of mp3 properly? - Developer IT

Why doesn't file detect the mime-type of mp3 properly?

files

Related posts about files

Unzip individual files from multiple zip files and extract those individual files to home directory

Storing image files, psd files, ai files, flash in subversion

Copy files in Linux, avoid the copy if files do exist in destination

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what is the difference between ELF files and bin files

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