winfile 1.0.0

A port of the Unix file command for Windows and Linux. It identifies what a
file is by looking inside it — magic-byte signatures, structural markers, and
encoding heuristics — rather than trusting the extension, which is a convention a
file may or may not honour. Output follows GNU file, so it drops into existing
scripts and pipelines unchanged.

Windows ships nothing equivalent.

Binaries

Asset	Platform
winfile_windows_amd64.exe	Windows, x86-64
winfile_windows_arm64.exe	Windows, ARM64
winfile_linux_amd64	Linux, x86-64
winfile_linux_arm64	Linux, ARM64

Each is self-contained: put one on your PATH and run it, nothing to extract or
install. On Linux, chmod +x it first.

The binary takes its name from argv[0], so renaming it renames the tool in its
own messages — copy it as winfile.exe, or as file if you would rather it
answered to that.

What it detects

Images, audio and video containers, archives (ZIP, gzip, bzip2, XZ, zstd, LZ4,
7-Zip, RAR, tar, cab, ar), OOXML documents and other ZIP-based containers such as
EPUB, JAR and APK, executables and object files for several platforms, databases,
fonts, and a text pass that reports the encoding — ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 with
either byte order, and Latin-1 — along with the line endings.

Verified against the original

Checked against GNU file on Linux, which agrees on PDFs, ASCII text and the
other everyday cases. One known gap: for ELF binaries winfile reports the
broad class — ELF 64-bit LSB shared object — where GNU file goes on to name
the architecture, interpreter, build ID and stripped state.