OpenBSD @lemmy.sdf.org pmk @lemmy.sdf.org 10mo ago

Output of file(1)

Hello, I've tried to find someone else using OpenBSD in various places for a while now, but with no success, so I'm hoping someone will read this.

I'm wondering what your output is from file(1) on a file you know has text encoded as UTF-8.

On my system (7.3-stable) the output is "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text", and I'm trying to figure out if this is how it should be, or if I did something wrong setting up the system.

So, if you have a computer with OpenBSD and a minute to spare, could you try running file(1) on a UTF-8 file and see if it identifies it as UTF-8 or "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text"?

Thanks in advance

6 comments

Yep I have the same result so most likely you didn't do anything wrong. My VPS on openbsd.amsterdam shows this and my laptop does too.
- Aha, I understand, thank you! file(1) might not be utf8 aware yet then.
  
  I explored the source of file(1) and the part to determine file types of text file seems to be in text.c: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/file/text.c?rev=1.3&content-type=text/plain
  
  And especially this part:
  
  static int text_try_test(const void *base, size_t size, int (*f)(u_char)) { const u_char *data = base; size_t offset; for (offset = 0; offset < size; offset++) { if (!f(data[offset])) return (0); } return (1); } const char * text_get_type(const void *base, size_t size) { if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_ascii)) return ("ASCII"); if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_latin1)) return ("ISO-8859"); if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_extended)) return ("Non-ISO extended-ASCII"); return (NULL); }
  
  So file(1) is not capable of saying if a file is UTF-8 right now. There is some other file (/etc/magic) which can help to determine if a text file is UTF-7 or UTF-8-EBCDIC because those need a BOM but as you said UTF-8 does not need a BOM. So it looks like we are stuck here :)

6 comments