How to find the MIME type of a file

Some MIME types can be intuitive - application/pdf for PDF files. However, not all MIME types are that easy to get exactly right - application/vnd.ms-excel for xls or Excel files.

The following are different ways, using the command line, to identify the MIME type of a file.

• xdg-mime

  
  $ xdg-mime query filetype somefile.xls
  application/vnd.ms-excel
  

• file

  
  $ file -b --mime-type somefile.xls
  application/vnd.ms-excel
  

• gvfs-info

  
  $ gvfs-info -a standard::content-type somefile.xls
  attributes:
    standard::content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel