Application/octet-stream ?? Help please

**Lady Jedi** · 03-03-2012, 06:50 PM

Greetings, Swamp dwellers, I need a little help with a confusing file. I am taking some college credits through Penn Foster correspondence school. Whenever they grade any of my writing assignments they leave a link on my student homepage to view the instructor's evaluation file. The problem is that the file shows up as an "application/octet-stream" with no actual file type extension, so I cannot get any program to actually open this and display it in English.

I can email my instructor and have them send a Word file, but it would be nice to skip that step and just download my evaluation. Do any of y'all know how get one of these to open?

**acdcfanbill** · 03-03-2012, 08:25 PM

Not sure, but if you're submitting a word doc, my guess it's probably a word doc with notes. you could dl it and try looking at it with a hex editor for some clues.

often files will have stuff like %png as the first bytes in them because programs don't rely on file extensions to determine file type. for instance, renaming a .jpg to .gif doesn't make it a gif file.

edit: if you have notepad++ you could open it w/ that too.

Sabretooth · 03-03-2012, 11:23 PM

Have you tried Open With... > Microsoft Word?

TiE23 · 03-05-2012, 11:10 AM

I used to get that problem viewing YouTube videos in Firefox months and months ago. Click on a link to any video and I"d get that instead. It was pretty ridiculous.

Try another browser, yo. That would be my first step.

**Lady Jedi** · 03-14-2012, 12:59 AM

Thank you, guys. After much trial and error, I was able to click the dl link in Firefox, tell it I wanted to view in IE, tell IE to open the file, save it, and viola! My evaluation!

Funny story, though. My grade came in at an 84% and I knew that I had done better than that, so I called the head of the writing department, and asked her to look it over. She immediately disagreed with the other professor's evaluation and regraded. Bumped me to a 96%. Woot!