Question

16

How to find the difference between a script file and a binary file?

rated 0 times [ 16] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 4825 / 1 Year ago, thu, may 11, 2023, 3:43:11

$ ls -l /usr/bin

total 200732



-rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root     156344 Oct  4  2013 adb

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root       6123 Oct  8  2013 add-apt-repository

 list goes long ---------

In the above adb is a binary file and add-apt-repository is a script file.I get this information by viewing the files through nautilus.But through command line, i didn't find any differences.I am not able to predict whether a file is binary file or a script file.

So how do I differentiate between script and binary files through the command-line?

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answered 1 Year ago admin · Accepted Answer

Just use file:

$ file /usr/bin/add-apt-repository

/usr/bin/add-apt-repository: Python script, ASCII text executable

$ file /usr/bin/ab

/usr/bin/ab: ELF 64-bit LSB  shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=569314a9c4458e72e4ac66cb043e9a1fdf0b55b7, stripped

As explained in man file:

NAME

   file — determine file type



DESCRIPTION

 This manual page documents version 5.14 of the file command.



 file tests each argument in an attempt to classify it.  There are three

 sets of tests, performed in this order: filesystem tests, magic tests,

 and language tests.  The first test that succeeds causes the file type to

 be printed.



 The type printed will usually contain one of the words text (the file

 contains only printing characters and a few common control characters and

 is probably safe to read on an ASCII terminal), executable (the file con‐

 tains the result of compiling a program in a form understandable to some

 UNIX kernel or another), or data meaning anything else (data is usually

 “binary” or non-printable).  Exceptions are well-known file formats (core

 files, tar archives) that are known to contain binary data.  When adding

 local definitions to /etc/magic, make sure to preserve these keywords.

 Users depend on knowing that all the readable files in a directory have

 the word “text” printed.  Don't do as Berkeley did and change “shell

 commands text” to “shell script”.

You can also use a trick to run this directly on the name of the executable in your $PATH:

$ file $(type -p add-apt-repository | awk '{print $NF}')

/usr/local/bin/add-apt-repository: Python script, ASCII text executable

$ file $(type -p ab | awk '{print $NF}')

/usr/bin/ab: ELF 64-bit LSB  shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=569314a9c4458e72e4ac66cb043e9a1fdf0b55b7, stripped

To find the file type of all executables that can be found in the directories of your $PATH, you can do this:

find $(printf "$PATH" | sed 's/:/ /g') -type f | xargs file

And to run file on all files in a particular directory (/usr/bin, for example), just do

file /usr/bin/*