One of the first things we old computer riders learned is to recognize file extensions and formats. This allows us to determine with certain ease the application we need to view and/or edit content. But, among other things, the latest versions of the most popular operating systems do not place much emphasis on extensions, and often hide them. This detail leaves the average user trapped in uncertainty. However, the freeware TrIDNet dedicated to file extension identification can pull them out of it.
On more than one occasion I have shared documents in ODT format to ensure that the content can be read by almost any device, but inevitably the question came: "What is this file?" Something similar happened to me with an ePUB ebook, which I had to convert to PDF to avoid causing a nervous breakdown on the other side. Formats and extensions, little demons that have accompanied us for decades, and to which we must continue to pay our respects. Some are better known than others, and in some cases compatibility is so broad that they cause no problems... but imagine for a moment that you want to rescue files from old floppy disks, and you come across one with the WS extension...
How to open that file?
My accumulated experience under DOS will tell you that it is a document made in the old WordStar. However, there is also the option of downloading TrIDNet. This freeware, developed by Italian programmer Marco Pontello, has more than six thousand extensions in its database, reducing the identification process to a couple of clicks. Open the program, point it to the mysterious file, and that's it. There is a possibility that TrIDNet may be a bit ambiguous with certain extensions. For example, the .scr extension (screensaver) is reported as 'executable', but these are isolated cases.
TrIDNet is easy to use, though it demands a bit of work. The program is stored in a zip file that we must unzip to a temporary folder, while its database is downloaded separately. The content of the database (more than six thousand XML files) must be dumped into the same temporary folder for TrIDNet to recognize the entries. Uncomfortable? Very much so, but it works!
