12.04 LTS (Precise) libmagic1 not returning ANY mime-type for some Microsoft Office files

[Michael Jarvis]

I am working on some software that will analyze arbitrary files, and determine the mime type using libmagic1 (tied closely with the "file" package).

I have a C program that links with libmagic1, and it calls magic_file() correctly, but for certain files it's returning an empty string for the mime type. It appears to be Microsoft Office documents (such as Word and Excel documents), and the mime type returned is "; charset=binary" instead of something like "application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=binary". At the very least, I would expect it to return "application/octet-stream" instead of just nothing.

This has been fixed in later versions of libmagic1, since I cannot reproduce on 13.04 raring or 13.10 saucy. I've also downloaded and compiled file 5.10 and 5.15 from source (http://www.darwinsys.com/file/) on 12.04 LTS and that worked fine as well, so I'm confident this is a bug in the libmagic1 package.

Can we get a fix pushed for 12.04 LTS?

Thanks

lsb_release -rd returns "Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS" on my test system.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.