How to get a file's UTI from the command line in Mac OS X?

Question

Is there a command line utility to which I can pass a filename, that will return applicable UTIs for that file?

For example:

hypothetical-uti-fetcher /Library/Desktop\ Pictures/Aqua\ Blue.jpg

might give me:

public.jpeg
public.image
public.data

Answer 1

You can use the mdls command to find the UTI for a file. Just do the command mdls /Library/Desktop\ Pictures/Aqua\ Blue.jpg and it will give you a bunch of info, toward the top it will say something like kMDItemContentType = "public.plain-text". Hope this helps!