README

Introduction

guile-magic provides bindings to libmagic (the library that provides the core logic to the file command) for Guile Scheme.

Prerequisites

• Guile 2.2 or 3.0
• libmagic (the package is called libmagic-dev on Ubuntu & libmagic in Homebrew; YMMV)

Installing

cd /tmp
curl -L -O https://github.com/sp1ff/guile-magic/archive/1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xf 1.0.0.tar.gz
cd guile-magic-1.0.0
./configure && make all check
sudo make install

Getting Started

The API is designed to be simple:

scheme@(guile-user)> (use-modules (magic))
scheme@(guile-user)> (magic-file-type "/usr/bin/file")
$2 = "ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=2b26928f841d92afa31613c2c916a3abc96bbed8, stripped"

should produce the same output as invoking the file command with no options.

That said, all the features exposed by libmagic are available:

(use-modules (magic))
(let ((some-file "my-file")
      (m (make-magic-set #:opts (list magic-symlinks magic-compress)
                         #:magic "my-cool-magic-file"
                         #:params '((magic-param-indir-max . 32)))))
  (format #t "~a\n" (magic-file m some-file))
  (format #t "~a\n" (magic-buffer m my-bytevector))) ;; just drop `m' on the floor-- it will be cleaned-up

Status & Roadmap

Although this is a new Scheme module, it is feature-complete inasmuch as it exposes nearly all of the features exposed by libmagic. Therefore, aside from bugfixes, I don’t foresee significant new development.