GUESS Converter

Extract text from GUESS files


Drop or upload your .GUESS file
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How to extract text from your GUESS file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your GUESS file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert GUESS to another file type

To convert your GUESS file to another format, you need GNU Autoconf or other Developer software.

Convert a file to GUESS

To convert other file formats to the "Build Automation Script" file type, you need software like GNU Autoconf or a similar tool.


About GUESS files

A .guess file is most frequently the config.guess shell script associated with the GNU Build System. These files act as the foundational logic for compiling software from source code, specifically tasked with identifying the host machine's "system triplet" (e.g., x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). While indispensable for developers on Unix-like systems, they present immediate friction for Windows users. Because the operating system does not natively recognize the .guess suffix (often treating config as the filename and guess as the extension), double-clicking results in an "Open With" error dialog. Furthermore, these scripts are plain text but lack the TXT extension, making them difficult to preview in standard editors without manual association. In rare cases (approx. 17%), a file named guess may be a compiled ELF executable, which is binary data that cannot be read by text editors and will appear as garbled characters. To inspect the logic without risking accidental modification or execution, we recommend converting these scripts to TXT for universal readability or PDF for archival documentation. If the file is a binary ELF, it typically requires disassembly or a Linux environment to run.

Convert.Guru analyzes your GUESS file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted SCRIPT files.


FAQ

If you want to convert GUESS file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use GNU Autoconf or similar software from the "System Configuration Script" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to GUESS, try GNU Autoconf or another comparable tool in the "System Configuration Script" category.



The GUESS Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our GUESS converter.