$ file EDK
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But since you're most likely in Win32-land,

You can install file

<Picky>

As to your second (non-Perl) question, "Can I open a file simply named 'C:/EDK'?" -- of course!

my $file = "EDK";
open (FH, '<', $file) or die "Can't open file $file $!";
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As to my phrase "second (non-Perl) question" your remark "I don't know how I would open a file without an extension name?" is not a question.

The point is NOT grammar-Nazi-dom; it's "be clear, accurate, precise and careful." And just BTW, were one to read your remark as "please tell me how to use Perl to open a file without an extension name" an appropriate answer would be perldoc -f open

Thanks Gents!

You can of course only guess what the proper encoding is...

One way to guess would be to open the file with different encodings and print the result, the one the "looks right" is probably the right one.

In perl you can supply the encoding to use to the open, so this approach could work:

use strict;
use Encode;

my @encodings = Encode->encodings;

for my $encoding (@encodings) {
 open(my $fh, "<:encoding($encoding)", "C:/EDK") or die $!;
 my $content = do { local $/; <$fh>; };

 print "encoding: $encoding:\n$content\n";
}
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