Sometimes we accidentally download files from the Internet, and sometimes they come from emails as attachments. The main problem is raised when you want to open the file type, identifying before opening them is a good option to avoid viruses and malware. Most of us search the file type in Google to download the correct opener to the file type. But what if a file contains a virus or malware? better is to avoid them. Today I want to share a very useful tool to identify unknown file types without opening them with TrID.
TrID is a portable file identifier comes in three versions. A web online tool, command line and a GUI version. If you want to quickly check a file Web version comes as handy. Simply open the web page and click on choose and locate the file on your computer and select it. Next click on the Analyze option to identify the unknown file type instantly.
The results are shown with reference URL and how many extensions item matches.
The command line version allows you to identify the unknown file type easily with simple commands. You can see the full list of command lines by typing trid in the command line window. TrID uses a database full of definitions and continuously adding whenever the new file type is available.
The third and last type of the program is a graphical user interface version. It is user-friendly, those who don’t like the command version they can go with GUI version. But you need to download all definitions to your computer to work the program. The program sizes only 32kb and definitions database sizes less than one MB.
Overall it is a very good program to identify the unknown file formats easily.