Siegfried

Siegfried
A PRONOM based, command line, file format identification tool using Aho Corasick matching and no buffer limits.
Homepage:	http://www.itforarchivists.com/siegfried
Status:	Maintained ✅
Source Code:	https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried
License:	Apache License 2.0
Cost:	Free
Function:	File Format Identification

Description

Siegried is a file format identification tool that, like DROID and Fido, is based on PRONOM. However, it uses a different pattern matching algorithm that offers different strengths and weaknesses to those other PRONOM based tools. A detailed description of the tool and why it was created can be found in this blog post. Besides, there is a more detailed description in terms of functionality on the Github Page of Siegfried.

Siegfried was first publicly released the 28th february 2014 in version 0.1.

User Experiences

• ZBW:
  • The command line tool is very easy to handle.
    The default output is yaml. This can be changed to csv or json.
    • Usual command: sf file.ext (will output in yaml)
    • Change output to csv: sf -csv file.ext
    • Change output to json: sf -json file.ext
  • It is also possible to save the output in an external file:
    • sf file.ext >output.yml
    • sf -csv file.ext >output.csv
    • sf -json file.ext >output.json

Development Activity

All development activity is visible on GitHub: http://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried/commits

Activity Feed

Below the last 5 commits:

2026-09-27 02:05:11

[tag:github.com,2008:Grit::Commit/7fb430be27d2284b2cf9390831707ae53d87a4c2 update to v1.11.9]

by richardlehane https://github.com/richardlehane

2026-09-27 01:59:29

[tag:github.com,2008:Grit::Commit/ec4f45d405e88f036b0f4fd5a8f6919b7d6618d8 change ErrEmptySource to ErrEmpty]

by richardlehane https://github.com/richardlehane

2026-09-27 01:54:40

[tag:github.com,2008:Grit::Commit/481850ec1180f82bb0b2c605b5dc06c7baa5d152 Merge pull request #297 from djjuhasz/dev/public-err-empty-source]

by richardlehane https://github.com/richardlehane

2026-09-15 23:10:08

[tag:github.com,2008:Grit::Commit/89a7d6e94849413ec62a65991233bff2d5487e05 Add ErrEmptySource to public API]

by djjuhasz https://github.com/djjuhasz

2026-09-15 09:46:27

[tag:github.com,2008:Grit::Commit/8062c3de613f7eced639b40904118059f9ac745c v1.11.8]

by richardlehane https://github.com/richardlehane

Release Feed

2026-09-27 02:12:52

[tag:github.com,2008:Repository/17277958/v1.11.9 Version 1.11.9]

by github-actions[bot]

2026-09-15 11:06:00

[tag:github.com,2008:Repository/17277958/v1.11.8 Version 1.11.8]

by github-actions[bot]

2026-09-14 09:33:40

[tag:github.com,2008:Repository/17277958/v1.11.7 Version 1.11.7]

by github-actions[bot]

2026-07-12 09:11:43

[tag:github.com,2008:Repository/17277958/v1.11.6 Version 1.11.6]

by github-actions[bot]

2026-07-11 03:31:39

[tag:github.com,2008:Repository/17277958/v1.11.5 Version 1.11.5]

by richardlehane