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Comment by noufalibrahim | Hacker News Reader

One underappreciated (though mentioned) hero in this little saga is the venerable file(1) command.

      proposal: Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0

It's so incredibly useful and so easily overlooked. I almost reflexively reach out to it when I'm curious about a file and the information it returns is just sufficient to satiate my curiosity and be useful.

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I agree, file is such a great tool.

I have cursed so many times in the past when I sat in front of a work computer that ran Windows and didn’t have this tool easily available. (Later on, WSL made life easier, but now I’m luckily nearly Windows-free.)

One might even say that file has a lot of magic in it.

file has a lot of magic, but a file typically has only one magic.

I'd say it has a number of magic.

Definitely uses magic to do its work.

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