this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Linux mostly doesn't use file extensions... It relies on "magic bytes" in the file.
Same with the web in general - it relies purely on MIME type (e.g.
text/htmlfor HTML files) and doesn't care about extensions at all."Magic bytes"? We just called them headers, back in my day (even if sometimes they are at the end of the file)
The library that handles it is literally called "libmagic". I'd guess the phrase "magic bytes" comes from the programming concept of a magic number?
I did not know about that one! It makes sense though, because a lot of headers would start with, well yeah, "magic numbers". Makes sense.