Package: file Version: 4.26-1 Severity: wishlist file can detect the encoding of plain text files:
$ file iso8859.txt iso8859.txt: ISO-8859 text However, it won't do this for e.g. Perl scripts: $ file iso8859.pl iso8859.pl: a /usr/bin/perl script text executable This is IMO an inconsistent behaviour. I was always wondering why file detected the encoding reliably in some cases and not at all in others until I noticed that it only works for text files. With a trick it's possible to detect the encoding anyway: $ file -m /dev/null iso8859.pl iso8859.pl: ISO-8859 text but this is not intuitive. I found it by looking through the manpage and trying every option :) file should either print the encoding of non-text files by default or it should have a switch to enable that behaviour. -- System Information: Debian Release: 5.0.4 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages file depends on: ii libc6 2.7-18lenny2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libmagic1 4.26-1 File type determination library us ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime file recommends no packages. file suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
