FileID -- A File IDentifier program. V 1.41 February 19,1994 WHAT IS IT? The best program in the world. It does everything! Well, maybe not everything. OK, the program identifies and gives information about a variety of file types. These currently include ARC, GIF, IFF, JFIF-JPEG, PCX, Sun Raster, and TIFF files. More may be added in the future. Send us docs (and an example file or three) on your favorite format, and we'll consider adding it. WHAT DOES IT DO? ARC files: Gives file names, file size (uncompressed and compressed), date of files, CRC check of files, total combined size of files (compressed and uncompressed) and the total number of files. Picture files: Gives resolution, number of colors, and any other information it can determine (special Amiga display modes for instance). Sound files: Gives appropriate information from the header of the file including as appropriate: sampling rate, volume, number of instruments, etc. Animation files: Gives type of compression, resolution of the animation, timing of the animation, etc. Other IFF types: Identifies and gives a short description. The GIF87a & 89a standards and all IFF formats listed in the "AmigaDos 1.3 Includes and Autodocs Manual" (and a few more) are supported. DISTRIBUTION The program (bearing our copyright) may be distributed freely by any electronic means: BBS, network, floppy disk, etc. as long as all the contents of this archive are bundled together and are not altered or modified in any way beyond the changing of the archive format in which they are enclosed. Usage is free to individuals (see donations, below). Usage by government or commercial sites requires registration. See LICENSE.DOC for a more complete policy. HELPFUL HINTS If you use this program a lot you may want to rename the executable file to something shorter like FI or FID. Anything that makes sense to you will work. Usage is fairly simple. Just type FileID at the prompt for a short list of options. Caution: Verbose mode is REALLY verbose. Get your finger over that screen pause button. Women and children first. To make it easier on yourself you might want to redirect the output to a file like FILEID.RPT or FileID.Report or something similar. A CAVEAT FileID will probably identify your file even if it doesn't have a clue as to what the file really is. This feature is present because some of the formats we support have very minimal "magic cookie" identification marks in the files. Combine this with support for files that have had their beginnings padded by brain dead operating systems, and there are bound to be occassional misidentifications. The most common mis-id is for FileID to identify the file as a PCX picture. If this happens, and the resolution info doesn't make any sense, ignore the result. DONATIONS We'd really like to hear from you! Send us a postcard, or E-mail letting us know how you're using the program. In addition feel free to send us money, baked goods, scantily clad women, whatever, when your conscience instructs you to do so. Confidentiality guarateed. We're two attractive college students in our mid twenties, who someday will make a lot of money. Really! SUPPORT We try to keep the latest versions of the program posted to GEnie, UseNet, and several Internet sites. THE AUTHORS The original author, Lloyd Eldred, can be reached at: GEnie - L.Eldred Internet - leldred@afit.af.milu US-Snail: 1777 #G Arlin Pl., Fairborn, OH 45324 %% Lloyd Eldred %% Additional author, Fred Homan, can be reached at: Internet - Fred@polaris.async.vt.edu US-Snail: PO Box 232, Blacksburg, VA 24063-0232 Fred Op VERSION HISTORY 1.00 Initial release August 23, 1990 1.10 Second release November 18, 1990 - Added more intelligent treatment of GIFs with Macintosh resource forks padded to the beginning. (FLAME: If they wanted a fork on the file, they'd have put it in the standard!) - Moved the copyright notice to the program help. - Partial support of GIF-89a added. This new standard seems to follow the same format as 87a for resolution information, at least in the one test file that I have. I'll add more support as soon as I can find more formal documentation on the standard. 1.20 Third release November 25, 1990 - Complete support of the GIF89a standard. - Control output flags added. "-c" outputs any GIF89a included comments. "-t" outputs a single line numeric dump of resolution and colors. "-v" outputs any and all information on a GIF. Can be quite long! - Fred Homan conned into contributing to coding. 1.30 Fourth release January 25, 1991 - IFF support expanded. "-v" flag now enables complete listing of all chunks in the file, and interesting information about many. "-t" flag now enabled. "-c" outputs any plain text in the file. 1.40 Fifth release June 18, 1992 - ARC support added. - IFF support expanded. - TIFF support added. - JFIF-JPEG suport added. - PCX support added. - Sun Raster support added. 1.41 Sixth quasi-release Feb. 19,1994 Both Lloyd and Fred took time off from programming to do school stuff. Lloyd recently finished his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering. The 1.41 release changes consist entirely of updating the address information in the read.me file. There's some talk of updating FileID to support more formats, but it really hasn't gotten outdated. The Amiga version works just fine on Lloyd's new Amiga 4000/040 running AmigaDos 3.0. THE FUTURE We've got a lot of nifty ideas on how to expand the program. Send us feedback on what you'd like to see, and perhaps we'll do your suggestions first: 1) Fred, at least, thinks a really nifty idea would be to recognize all file formats common (and maybe uncommon) to the PC and Amiga. This could be very handy for those people who wonder exactly what xxxxxx.yyy is and what it's for. 2) Lloyd wants to add an AREXX port to the Amiga version, and create a picture data-base utility with FileID, AREXX, and Superbase Pro. (Fred points out additionally that OS/2 supports REXX). 3) Perhaps in the more distant future we will create "SuperMongoNinjaReptileGIF-IFFViewer" pending demand and time on our parts. (Do you really care anyway? We hope so.) (Heck, are you even reading this?) NIFTY LEGAL STUFF FileID is Copyright (c) 1990-1994 by Lloyd Eldred and Fredrick R Homan. All Rights Reserved. The use of copyrighted and trademarked names are in no way intended to infringe the rights of the holders. "The Graphics Interchange Format(c) is the Copyright property of CompuServe Incorporated. GIF(sm) is a Service Mark property of CompuServe Incorporated." ARC is copyrighted by Software Enhancement Associates. Superbase is copyrighted by Oxxi Software. OS/2 is copyrighted by IBM Corporation.