Re: Opening up password protected Microsoft Office files in Linux

From: Harold Stevens (wookie_at_aces.localdomain)
Date: 02/01/05 

Date: 1 Feb 2005 12:04:27 GMT

In <368snpF4qlgodU1@individual.net> sam1967@hetnet.nl:

[Snip...]

> no. it just said document was unreadable.

I'm reasonably sure OOo (etc.) developers would have handled this if a
certain purveyor of desktop monopolyware hadn't been such an ass about
precioussssssss proprietary "innovation" (xlate: protection racket).

I'm phrickin' ecstatic to be free of flawed "secured" MS nonsense. The
company that brought you Active-X and spyware, put "passwords" on some
transparently unencrypted ASCII encode scheme. Go figure.

Anyway, shot in the dark...

If you cannot get the password, try "strings" on it (if text and not a
bunch of graphics is really all you need-do "man strings"):

STRINGS(1) GNU Development Tools STRINGS(1)

NAME
       strings - print the strings of printable characters in files.

SYNOPSIS
       strings [-afov] [-min-len]
               [-n min-len] [--bytes=min-len]
               [-t radix] [--radix=radix]
               [-e encoding] [--encoding=encoding]
               [-] [--all] [--print-file-name]
               [--target=bfdname]
               [--help] [--version] file...

DESCRIPTION
       For each file given, GNU strings prints the printable character
       sequences that are at least 4 characters long (or the number given with
       the options below) and are followed by an unprintable character. By
       default, it only prints the strings from the initialized and loaded
       sections of object files; for other types of files, it prints the
       strings from the whole file.

Again, shot in the dark, YMMV, HTH... 

-- 
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