Search for AVI file?

[John Lenton]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 10:12:04PM +0200, Peter Kleiweg wrote:
> John Doe schreef:
> 
> > I realise that this is not really a python question, but python's the
> > only language I'd be comfortable trying to deal with this.
> >
> > What I need is to search a drive and find all the AVI format files
> > that are NOT listed with the AVI extension.  I'm looking over an old
> > drive of mine from an old computer.  I know the files were renamed
> > with the wrong extension, but I know that they were originally AVI
> > files.  Can python do this for me?  Any hints?  Anybody have a link to
> > something that would already do this?  I appreciate any help.
> 
> Use walk() to find all files. Open each file and read in the
> first 12 bytes. The last four of those 12 bytes should be
> 'AVI ', if I'm not mistaken.

Correct. According to file(1)'s database, there are two types of AVI:

    0 string RIFF RIFF (little-endian) data
    [...]
    >8      string          AVI\040         \b, AVI
    [...]
    0       string          RIFX            RIFF (big-endian) data
    [...]
    >8      string          AVI\040         \b, AVI

(meaning that little-endian AVIs start with 'RIFFAVI ', whereas
big-endian start with 'RIFXAVI ').

HTH

-- 
John Lenton (john at grulic.org.ar) -- Random fortune:
BOFH excuse #10:

hardware stress fractures
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