TrID File Identifier

TrID is a utility designed to identify file types from their binary signatures.
Homepage:	http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html
License:	Free for personal / non commercial use
Platforms:	Windows, Linux

Description

TrID is a utility designed to identify file types from their binary signatures. While there are similar utilities with hard coded rules, TriID has no such rules. Instead, it is extensible and can be trained to recognize new formats in a fast and automatic way.

It was first released in 2003. Currently, its library contains of 8408 entries.

User Experiences

It's a command line tool, which can be scripted pretty easily, e. g.:

 echo off 

 echo Please paste folder with files to identify: 

 echo ************************** 

 set /p inputfolder= folder : 

 for /r "%inputfolder%\" %%X in (*.*) do ( 

               echo new File >> gfindings.txt 
		
               echo TRId Findings >> govDocs.txt 
 
               trid "%%X" >> govDocs.txt 

 ) 

 Pause 

TrID works best for binary files, plain text files are just identified as "test/ASCII".

Findings are output in %, a file format, so typical TrID findings can be:

• 50.0% (.BMP) Windows Bitmap (v3) (2004/2)
• 100.0% (.FM) FrameMaker document (11000/1)
• 53.8% (.WRI) Windows Write Document (7000/1)

It is also possible that several file formats are output, e. g. 50% JPEG, 50% something else.