See the header position of a BIG file [closed]

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sometimes, we got a BIG file, but we don't know its file type. so we need to use a tool to peek the very first bytes of the file to find out its file type.

but the file is too big to the normal text editor, i have to wait for a long time!

P.S. I need tool开发者_如何学Gos, not the code.

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The tools on any reasonable *nix box are:

• file: knows a lot of magic headers and detects the type of a file.
• head: reads first several lines or bytes of a file.
• tail: reads last several bytes or lines of a file; some files have metainfo at the end.

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You could use xxd:

xxd -l 10 your-file

This displays the first 10 octets of your-file