How to Determine File Format

Some software that may help you can be found here;

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/what-file-is-that-how-to-identify-unrecognized-files-types-and-format/

Hope that helps.

Hi Andrew,

Just tried 'Smart File Advisor'... it didn't work at all.

Have you tried any of these applications yourself?

Cheers

How did you get that file ?

by checking the dump result of the given file, it looks like a sequence binary output file of an application, without file header.

Ramin,

It was sent to me as a .Zip file

OK, I couldn't get the software you recommended to work with the file

Any other suggestions?

I think that is likely just a generic data file out of some application, like an export, etc.

I can tell you from looking at it in hex, it's in EBCDIC format (not ASCII) so may have come from a mini/mainframe application.

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»bp

Do you know the sender ?

Can you ask him/her to give you some information about that file ?

Converting to ASCII there seems to be a header portion at the top, then repeating records of text and binary data.

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»bp

Bill

I can tell you from looking at it in hex, it's in EBCDIC format (not ASCII) so may have come from a mini/mainframe application.

You're spot on. I remember the person that sent it to me mention that the file was generated by an old skool mainframe application, but I can''t remember the application.

I would like to decode it so that I can run database queries on the decoded file

I hope that makes sense

Bill,

Very good point.

I think that was the answer I needed to know.

Cheers

Good answer Bill

Welcome, glad that was useful.

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»bp

I see that this question was already closed, and I admit to not reading all the messages in the thread, but based on the Title and the Question, I think that this Experts Exchange article may be helpful:

How to determine the type of file from its contents

Regards, Joe

Interesting article Joe, but in this case TrID came up with nothing.  Makes sense since this isn't a standard file of any pattern recognizable type, but rather likely an EBCDIC custom data file format.

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»bp

Thanks for that, Bill. I apologize for not reading the whole thread before posting.

And thanks to Ramin for the article endorsement — much appreciated!

Regards, Joe