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File identification library for Python.

Given a file (or some information about a file), return a set of standardizedtags identifying what the file is.

pip install identify

If you have an actual file on disk, you can get the most information possible(a superset of all other methods):

>>>fromidentifyimportidentify>>>identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/file.py'){'file','text','python','non-executable'}>>>identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/file-with-shebang'){'file','text','shell','bash','executable'}>>>identify.tags_from_path('/bin/bash'){'file','binary','executable'}>>>identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/directory'){'directory'}>>>identify.tags_from_path('/path/to/symlink'){'symlink'}

When using a file on disk, the checks performed are:

• File type (file, symlink, directory, socket)
• Mode (is it executable?)
• File name (mostly based on extension)
• If executable, the shebang is read and the interpreter interpreted

>>>identify.tags_from_filename('file.py'){'text','python'}

>>>identify.tags_from_interpreter('python3.5'){'python','python3'}>>>identify.tags_from_interpreter('bash'){'shell','bash'}>>>identify.tags_from_interpreter('some-unrecognized-thing')set()

$ identify-cli --helpusage: identify-cli [-h] [--filename-only] pathpositional arguments:  pathoptional arguments:  -h, --help       show this help message and exit  --filename-only

$identify-cli setup.py;echo$?["file", "non-executable", "python", "text"]0$identify-cli setup.py --filename-only;echo$?["python", "text"]0$identify-cli wat.wat;echo$?wat.wat does not exist.1$identify-cli wat.wat --filename-only;echo$?1

identify also has an api for determining what type of license is containedin a file. This routine is roughly based on the approaches used bylicensee (the ruby gem that github uses to figure out the license for arepo).

The approach thatidentify uses is as follows:

1. Strip the copyright line
2. Normalize all whitespace
3. Return any exact matches
4. Return the closest by edit distance (where edit distance < 5%)

To use the api, install viapip install identify[license]

>>>from identifyimport identify>>> identify.license_id('LICENSE')'MIT'

The return value of thelicense_id function is anSPDX id. Currentlylicenses are sourced fromchoosealicense.com.

A call totags_from_path does this:

1. What is the type: file, symlink, directory? If it's not file, stop here.
2. Is it executable? Add the appropriate tag.
3. Do we recognize the file extension? If so, add the appropriate tags, stophere. These tags would include binary/text.
4. Peek at the first X bytes of the file. Use these to determine whether it isbinary or text, add the appropriate tag.
5. If identified as text above, try to read and interpret the shebang, and addappropriate tags.

By design, this means we don't need to partially read files where we recognizethe file extension.