[GLLUG] Reading/converting unknown database file

[Henrik Morsing]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 04:18:48PM +0100, John Edwards wrote:
>Hi Henrik
>
>On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 12:53:24PM +0100, Alain D D Williams via GLLUG wrote:
><snip>
>> Use the strings program, you should see some of what you have in the catalogue.
>> If you cannot then it is possible that the data is encrypted or maybe just
>> compressed.
><snip>
>
>If 'strings' shows some text at the start but then mostly binary data
>afterwards then it might be a binary file (eg PKZIP, Gzip, sqlite)
>with a text header. The header could be either fixed length or until a
>given set of characters marks the end. I've seen that on some programs
>which want to quickly read in a summary of the contents of the file
>without having to look at the whole thing.
>
>So you could try stripping out any ASCII text at the start and then
>analysing the remainder with 'file' or something similar.
>

Hi John,

Oddly, strings, grep and cat fail miserably, but head shows lots of readable records from the file. But, if I take a string shown by head and grep it, it doesn't find it. Maybe head hides some control/binary characters.

Regards,
Henrik Morsing