By Windows Guides
Find File Types with No Extensions
Unlike Mac or Linux, the file extension is very important in Windows. The extension of a file indicates the content type and which program should be used to open that file. But sometimes we stumble upon files without any extension and we don’t know what to do with them. If you try to double-click on a file without any extension, Windows would just throw up an error that ‘No program is associated with this file type‘. But using an open-source program called TrID we can find out the file types of such files and then look for a program that can open it. TrID scans the files based on signatures and can successfully predict the file types based on the data contained inside a file without having to depend on the file extension.
TrID is an open source program but it is has only a command line interface (CLI). If you are not comfortable with a command line interface, then you can download a GUI designed for it called TrIDNET (the NET part means that this software was programmed in Microsoft .NET). You have to download the TrIDNET program and the definition files separately, extract their contents to the same folder and then run the TrIDNet.exe from there.
This excerpt appears with the permission of Windows Guides.
