Im not sure where to throw this topic so i figured this was as good a place as any.

My mom got an email from a friend of hers containing a picture in .jpg format and then 2 files both with the same name"Amazing" with .bin and .dat file extensions.

I know that .bin contains binary data and .dat is just data used by several different programs, but how would one open a .bin or a .dad with no other information? I'm familiar with the .cue and .bin image combo but it seems that both .bin and .dat are data containers, useless on there own.

Granted i could be over estimating my knowledge but im at a loss.

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Use notepad to inspect the file contents. If you're familiar with linux you could also use it to get the file type based on signature. Its called "libmagic" or "file magic":

sk@sk:~/p6$ ls
PDL-Generic.bin  PTSERVERv2-6a.bin  UDPDownload.exe  UDPDownload.ini
sk@sk:~/p6$ file *
PDL-Generic.bin:   data
PTSERVERv2-6a.bin: data
UDPDownload.exe:   MS-DOS executable PE  for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit
UDPDownload.ini:   ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
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