TrID - free program to ID files

Marco Pontello of Italy has posted a nifty utility to his web site which will assist you with identifying file types from their binary signatures. The utility operates in the same fashion as the hex editor described in the Tip of the Night for February 1, 2016 but will automatically provide you with the file types of groups of files saved to a folder.

Download the zip file posted to http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html - see the link for the Win32 option at the bottom of the page. Extract the contents to a folder on your C drive, and then also download the file listed as 'TrIDDefs.TRD package, 891KB ZIP (6673 file types, 13/03/16)' at the bottom of the page, and unzip it to the same folder.

In the folder with the TrID data, press CTRL + SHFT right click and choose the option for 'Open Command window here'. Type in 'trid' and the file path to the folder with the data you want to analyze. For example

C:\Users\SeanKOShea\Documents\tips\TrID\TrID>trid C:\Users\SeanKOShea\Documents\test\*

The file path should not have any spaces in it. At the end of the file path add in a forward slash and an asterisk at the end. As shown in this screen grab, TrID will list the programs that open each type of file.

Even better if you are dealing with a folder full of files which are missing file extensions, you can use TrID to automatically add the correct file extensions. Just add the command -ce after the file path:

C:\Users\SeanKOShea\Documents\tips\TrID\TrID>trid C:\Users\SeanKOShea\Documents\test\* -ce

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!!