User`s guide

Most files are in one of a few common formats, and many are a combination.
.sit StuffIt 1.5.1 archives
.hqx BinHex 4.0 file
.bin Binary file
.image Diskcopy 4.2 image file
.txt plain ASCII text file
.bsc Apple II BinSCII file
.shk Apple II ShrinkIt file
Most of the Macintosh files are BinHexed StuffIt files. This means you
need to transfer the file, then read the license agreement which is prepended to
it (with any text processor), use BinHex or any utility which can read BinHex
4.0 files to decode the BinHex to a StuffIt archive, then use UnStuffIt or the
StuffIt Expander (or a similar utility) to decompress the .sit file into the
final file.
In some cases the final file is a .image file. These are exact duplicates
of floppy disks (with verified checksums). Use Diskcopy to convert these files
into floppy disks for installation. Some Apple System Software is in this
format.
Most of the Apple II files are either straight text or BinSCII'd ShrinkIt
files. This means you need to transfer the file, then use BinSCII to convert the
.bsc file to a ShrinkIt file, then use ShrinkIt to create the final file or
disk.
Note: Apple calls their BinSCII'd .SHK files ".bsc" instead of ".bsq". It is
fairly common for uploaders and ftp sites to tag any BinSCII'd file as ".bsc".
The rationale is that, once a user un-BinSCII's a file, he or she will find an
.SHK, .ZIP, etc. file and know how to continue.
______________________________
From: David Kopper
016- How do I tell what kind of file this is?
Here is a simple guide to help you identify a file. You should always go by
filename extension first, but not everybody uses those. In Unix, you can use the
'head' command to look at the first couple of lines of a file. If it turns out
to be a binary file, you may be in for a surprise. You may want to use the Unix
'file' command to find out if it is a text file or not first. Once you have
identified the file, check the earlier info on filename extensions for how to
deal with it.
If there are lines in the file that look like this (there can be other text
before it--search for 'FiLeStArT'):
FiLeStArTfIlEsTaRt
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789()
GBINSCII AQhmAAAAA8)4MIAI02DA9ARMQEDtAQhmAIVZ
gYITA6u7xADA0MjM3YTNBlDOENkQwYURzITM2UDN5gzNDJUQGVERyEDM1QzM4cjN
CFUOFR0QxAjR0MjM3YTNBlDOENkQwAQRzITM2UDN5gzNDJUQGVERyEDM1QzM4cjN
...