How do I display filetype with ls?

I think the best way to display a file type is using this command:

file <filename>

If you want to list the types of all files in a directory, just use:

file *

For more details about the arguments, see:

man file

file is definitely the right choice to get the file type information you want. To combine its output with that of ls I suggest to use find:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -ls -exec file -b {} \;

This finds every file in the current directory and prints the output of ls -dils as well as the output of file -b for it, each on an own line. Example output:

  2757145      4 -rw-rw-r--   1 dessert dessert      914 Apr 26 14:02 ./some.html
HTML document, ASCII text
  2757135      4 -rw-rw-r--   1 dessert dessert      201 Apr 13 15:26 ./a_text_file
UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF, LF line terminators

But, as you don't want a filetype line but rather a filetype column, here's a way to get rid of the newline character between the lines:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c "ls -l {} | tr '\n' '\t'; file -b {}" \;

Sample output:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 914 Apr 26 14:02 ./some.html    HTML document, ASCII text
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 201 Apr 13 15:26 ./a_text_file  UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF, LF line terminators

That new column is quite long, so let's cut everything from the first comma:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c "ls -l {} | tr '\n' '\t'; file -b {} | cut -d, -f1" \;

The output of that looks like this:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 914 Apr 26 14:02 ./some.html    HTML document
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 201 Apr 13 15:26 ./a_text_file  UTF-8 Unicode text

This is not quite handy, so how about an alias? With the following line in your ~/.bash_aliases file you just need to run lsf to get the above output for the current directory.

alias lsf='find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c "ls -l {} | tr '"'\n'"' '"'\t'"'; file -b {} | cut -d, -f1" \;'