How can I get the mime type in PHP

[Omoikane]

I am writing a script and I need to correctly (I think some mime types can be different from their extensions) get the mime types of files (the files can be of any type).Web hosting company in use does not have \[code\]mime_content_type()\[/code\] and is still (don't know which year they will be fixing it) promising to fix the PECL alternative.Which other way can I go about it (and I don;t have access to shell commands)?