test() for binary file? about shelljs

[arturadib]

if there's a Unix equivalent of this you can request as a feature, but I'm not sure there is as per man test

[mstade]

As far as I know, there's no shell test for this, and pretty much all resource I could uncover on the topic suggests using the file command, with the caveat that it may or may not know what kind of file it is. Basically, whether a file is "binary" or not is only possible to determine by reading it and parsing the bytes, since every file is just a collection of bytes, be it text or not.

I'd suggest closing this since there's no single atomic way of doing this. Specific binary file types, sure, probably, but there's no generic way to distinguish pure text from pure binary, I think.

[arturadib]

thanks, Marcus!