Opening a .dat file

[Stojakapimp]

My friend sent me an email with some attachments of some pictures but it was in .dat format. So I tried to open it but I have to pick what program to open it with. Does anyone know what I can use to see these pictures?

 

[SDK2002]

just rename them from .dat to .bmp or .jpg

 

[RalfHutter]

What's up with email attachments that are named ".dat"?

I have a buddy whose attachments are always in that form. It's kind of a PITA because I have to keep renaming them until I get them to open up correctly.

Attachments that I get from other people are always in the correct form, the only weird ones come from this one guy. He's using the Netscape 4.x browsers' email client (Composer, I think it's called) but so do other people that I get mail from.

 

[Stojakapimp]

I tried renaming it to a .jpg, .bmp, and a .gif, but none of those worked. I think it's a bunch of pictures and not just one, so any ideas as to what format that would be?

 

[Nothinman]

.DAT is generic "Windows file extensions suck and I can't think of 3 letters to represent this file type", it could be anything. Email your friend and ask him what he used to create the file.

 

[Kazi]

well if its a bunch of pictures he might have compressed it (.ace - .rar - .zip etc etc) so best would be to ask him instead of trial and error on 40+ 3 letter entensions.

 

[singh]

Read this thread in its entirety. At the very least, it should give you one possible way to identify the type of attachment.

 

[Nothinman]

It would be easy if Windows had a similar command to 'file' on Linux, I'm not sure if there's a port other than install cygwin.

$file *
Backup.gif: GIF image data, version 89a, 500 x 350
Backups: directory
Desktop: directory
Docs: directory
GNUstep: directory
Q306795_SFU_2_X86.exe: MS Windows PE 32-bit Intel 80386 GUI executable not relocatable
bin: directory
blah.txt: ASCII text, with no line terminators
bzImage: Linux kernel x86 boot executable RO-rootFS, root_dev=0x306, Normal VGA
capture.pcap.gz: gzip compressed data, deflated, original filename, `capture.pcap', last modified: Thu May 9 14:02:45 2002, os: Unix
daemon311.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
devel: directory
diff.out: empty
maps: directory
mbox: ASCII mail text
mdac_typ.exe: MS Windows PE 32-bit Intel 80386 GUI executable not relocatable
ms.txt: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
plugin131.trace: ASCII text
rescue.bin: x86 boot sector, system SYSLINUX, FAT (12 bit)
sort.c: ASCII C program text
tmp: directory