Am I using pyWhat incorrectly?

[fleetofthought]

Hey! I came across PyWhat on HN -- it looks super cool and I was excited to use it! I installed it on Debian Buster system via command "pip3 install pywhat && pywhat --help" and the install went smoothly.
I'm using it as shown in the README (what /path/to/file/) but I can only get it to work on email addresses, URLs, IP addresses, and smart contract addresses.
When I try to run it on any directories or files present on my system, no matter which sort of file I try to get pyWhat to examine, the only output I receive is "Nothing found!"

Some of the different file/path formats I've tried, unsuccessfully, to run pyWhat on:

what this_is_bash.sh
what heres_a_python_script.py
what .viminfo
what nohup.out
what a_text_file.txt
what '/path/to/Pycharm/projects/directory/'

In all these cases (including trying to use "pywhat" or "python3 -m PyWhat" instead of "what" to examine these files) the only response I receive is "Nothing found!".

Am I using it incorrectly or missing something super obvious??

PyWhat seems super cool, would love to get this working.
Any advice would be much appreciated! :)

[ghost]

Please try running pywhat on fixtures/file file (https://github.com/bee-san/pyWhat/blob/main/fixtures/file). Do you still get no output?

[fleetofthought]

Thanks! I've tried running pywhat on some other files that contain URLs and .jpg files and it works, I get a nice identification.
So I think I misunderstood some of the use cases of pywhat - I thought I'd able to run it on any file and would get at least some output as to what the file is, somewhat like the "file" command. My bad!

Thanks to @SkeletalDemise and @piatrashkakanstantinass for your clarifications, much appreciated!

[bee-san]

file and would get at least some output as to what the file is, somewhat like the "file" command. My bad!

It actually should output that, as it can identify magic numbers. Maybe a PR broke that feature? 😟
https://github.com/bee-san/pyWhat/blob/main/pywhat/magic_numbers.py <- Related code for that

PyWhat should have full file support 🤷 😞

[fleetofthought]

Hey @bee-san - First, thanks for creating this, I really do think it's neat :)

Second, thanks for pointing me to the relevant file, I'm going to take a look at it and see if I can find anything relevant. If I can get it working on my machine I'll submit a PR.

[ghost]

Pywhat prints that file is found only if there is some data that was identified. @bee-san

[bee-san]

@piatrashkakanstantinass ah :-( seems like a bug to me! it should be able to print what a file is, as that's just as important as what's in it 😄