TrID

Regardless of their type, files have a lot more under the hood than they let visible. This bits of info are not for everyone, but dedicated to developers to help create new products, or patch up things. For instance, TrID is a small program capable of analyzing the internal structure of any kind of file to reveal its type.

Advantages of portability

A neat thing is you don’t have to go through an installation process to make the application work, so you can easily carry it around on a USB flash drive to use on other PCs as well. What’s more, you don’t have to worry about affecting the health status of the target computer, because registries are not modified.
Needless to say that you need to access the application’s features from the Command Prompt, since it’s a command line utility. It’s also a good idea to keep the target files close, or in the same folder, so you don’t have to write the entire path in the target parameter.

Definitions database download required

At its core, the application uses its own algorithm to read a file’s binary signature, so this way it knows all about it, without reading the extension. In fact, this is why the application is used in the first place, with options to target any kind of file, even if there’s no extension attached, because you soon reveal it.
There is a bit more to the process, and you might have to visit the developer page in order to grab a list of known definitions, otherwise the application has nothing to compare binary data to, and returns no results. Some built-in switches can also be used in order to update definitions, or have the extension changed.

To end with

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that TrID comes in handy if you want to know more about your files, or even find out extension, in case it’s not written down, or doesn’t seem to be compatible with any editor you try. You need to download the definitions database first, but it only takes a little while, and results are instantly delivered.