UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Everyone,


I have a question for you all. I am working at a company and we are trying to recover .dat files which were created on an older linux box and we have a folder of .dat files that are unreadable. When you try to open them in a text editor you get jibberish all shapes and sizes and when you try to open the files in a file viewer it shows them as a hexadecimal/binary file. These .dat files ultimately have or should have readable data in them stating what we need. If anyone has some solutions or would like to know further details I really would appreciate it. I also checked the permissions on the files and the user it belongs to on the unix box and we were unable to open them on the unix box or on the windows box.

Thanks

Comsidering the extention of the file (.dat) I doubt they are plain text files. Allthough any extention can be given to a file in Unix, it is not common to use it for plain text files.

The following command could provide you some info about that kind of files they are:

file <filename>
or just
file *

So "file" is a command here and not a reference to a file, <filename> is one of those .dat files.

To see if there is any ascii content at all in those files you can use the command:

strings <filename>

How were these files created? By some kind of application? If so, which application?

The file was created in a proprietary fortran script.

Also where should i apply the command you stated above?

In the directory where to .dat files are located on those .dat files

nah that doesnt make sense........I guess what im trying to say is do you know a way to read these dat files so we can understand what they mean besides hex or binary because they were made in fortran and they have important info on them that my company needs and we have tried alot and before we recreate lets says 500 dat files we want to try to get them readable.

sb008 is telling you to run the file command to see if it can identify what the actual file type is, without knowing how the files were written how can you expect someone to be able to tell you how to read them?