@Oktokolo this is one of those examples where I think I saved time by just specifically honing in on my own personal use for the thing. sigh. still I feel like playing around a bit.

you wouldn't believe all the things a person never heard of in here !

@Demolishun yeah. I think I overthought this.

So I just noted 'wow' the 'file' utility recognized a python script that wasn't properly labeled.

.... now i am wondering how well.

@AvatarOfKaine Shame on you young man for making a valid point !

https://youtu.be/p-V6-CsOdmo

oh cool.

@electrineer See the problem is the list is exhaustive. It contains some really obscure things like Panther JAM project files or Dragon Audio Projects.

I had only ever heard of those tools the last time my dumb ass started working on this same project.

Apparently there is a tool in linux called 'file' that does these things.

@electrineer well yes but i'm just looking for a quick and dirty way to categorize filenames in a data structure based off mostly likely extension.

unless... do you know of a tool that reads a few bytes in and determines the filetype that runs on Linux ?

I'm pretty sure even the OS will default to a filetype in the explorer display that might be incorrect, usually it will seem to default to whatever an installed application registers the extension as in some cases otherwise saying things like '.pbt file', if there is nothing associated with '.pbt file'.

Or say classical types like .PNT.

@Oktokolo you mean like PhotoRec ? I betcha anything that it looks for the header in most cases.

Even shapefiles contain record counts for example.

@nitwhiz Note I mentioned a lack of header information. Seems to me that the answer is an AI could be trained to determine a few best case scenarios as to what it was looking at unless there was a positively perfect way of identifying usable data.

Example, in a packed file database you might have a packed byte record that contained a starting autoincrement column using an 8 byte storage location, and then a 20 character varchar field containing a length descriptor and x bytes of alphanumeric data.

That an AI might be able to identify.

Pixel data would be harder unless you added an Image classifier and the image itself actually depicted something recognizable beyond a shadow of a doubt.

@electrineer yeah its not for sale though it's just some organized data taken off a website for my application to use. its just annoying to have to start over.

its basically a sqlite collection of the data from http://www.fileinfo.com