Tools and utilities for working with the format-corpus repo, and format signatures

Fidget is a command-line tool for testing and generating format identification signatures.

Download the Windows or *NIX binary package from here. Unpack it and run the supplied script, either directly from that folder or by adding it to your PATH.

$ fidget test.pdf
application/pdf

If you're not sure if Fidget already supports a particular format, you can find out by looking through the supported formats. To list all known formats, use this:

$ fidget -l

and you'll get a bit tab-separated list showing MIME type, extensions, the 'name' (which is the same as the type at present) and the description (if any). This option can be combined with the -s and -A options (see below)

If you create a new signature in the Tika-compatible Mime-Info standard format (e.g. this one generated using Percipio), you can test it like this:

$ fidget -s src/test/resources/percipio.pdf.xml test.pdf
application/pdf

By default, the new signature information is merged in with the existing signatures. If you want to avoid this, and test the signature in isolation, you can use the -A option:

$ fidget -A -s src/test/resources/percipio.pdf.xml test.jpg
application/octet-stream

Fidget also contains some experimental functionality to convert Mime-Info signatures into DROID signatures. You can invoke it like this:

$ fidget -C -s src/test/resources/percipio.pdf.xml 

Note that a live web connection is required to make this work, as it relies upon a web-based conversion service supplied by the National Archives of the UK.

$ fidget -?
usage: fidget [OPTION]... [FILE]...
 -?,--help               print help message
 -A,--alone              use only the supplied signature file, do not load
                         the embedded ones
 -C,--convert-to-droid   convert supplied signature file into DROID form
 -l,--list               list all known types.
 -s,--sig-file <FILE>    use this mime-info signature file