NSHipster / uti

A command-line utility that prints the Uniform Type Identifier for files.

uti

A command-line utility that prints the Uniform Type Identifier for the files provided as an argument.

Requirements

• macOS 10.4+

Usage

$ uti Hello.swift
public.swift-source

Results for multiple path arguments are printed on separate lines in the order they're provided:

$ uti index.html screen.css app.js
public.html
public.css
com.netscape.javascript-source

If any of the provided file path arguments are invalid, the command exits with status code 1 and prints a message to standard error.

$ uti invalid
error: invalid is not a file or directory

You can combine uti with other Unix commands. For example, to list the UTI for each file in a directory, you might invoke the find command like so:

$ ls .
Xcode_11.xip
Xcode.app

$ find . -exec uti {} +
com.apple.xip-archive
com.apple.application-bundle

Installation

Homebrew

Run the following command to install using homebrew:

$ brew install nshipster/formulae/uti

Manually

Run the following commands to build and install manually:

$ git clone https://github.com/NSHipster/uti.git
$ cd uti
$ make install

Additional Details

uti delegates to the mdls system command, requesting the kMDItemContentType metadata attribute and processing the output.

License

MIT

Contact

Mattt (@mattt)