Comment by chrisseaton

11 years ago

Why does file always passive aggressively note the fact that you're using 'very long lines'? I'm not sure it's relevant to the format of the file.

`file` does more than identify the file format; it also looks for properties. It can detect sizes and color properties for most image and video formats, various audio properties for audio formats etc.

"Very long lines" is sort of a property of text files. It means it's unlikely to have been written by hand for one thing.

  • Hmmm... I'm cynically inclined to believe it's there as a condescending remark about people the authors of file think aren't real hackers because they're not wrapping their lines to 80 characters.