> Well, then you can use the cc -E ... | grep __ELF__ test I proposed before.  
> We shouldn't rely on file(1) to report specific messages (think third party
> file(1)s in $PATH), or even work properly (there have been many bugs in the
> past).

That is okay for deciding if you're using ELF or not -- but is that
sufficient?  How many object file formats does NetBSD use/support?  On
GNU/Linux, the decision was made to use file(1) because it was just a
no-brainer: Linux distributions can use ELF, a.out (three variants) or
COFF. :-(

Ben