On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 03:55:37PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: > Try: > > $ file ae_962.orig.tar.gz > > ...which will guess at the file type from various characteristics. You > can also try running 'head' or 'dd' of a few bytes of a file -- output > may or may not be messy, but you can see the raw data yourself. > > $ head -10 file > $ dd if=file count=1 bs=1024 > I also find "strings" helpful. strings file | head -n25 Mike