Cardfile for Windows CRD Files Reader

ReadCrd is a cross-planform console application which prints content of a Cardfile for Windows 3.x file (CRD extension, contact list). The file signature must be MGC or RRG.

Usage

Download the Linux or Windows binary file in a folder with CRD files and run it in a console.

./ReadCrd Contacts.CRD

or to read a file with Windows-1251 encoding

./ReadCrd -e Windows-1251 Contacts.CRD

Limitations

• Files with the RRG signature can contain OLE Objects. In this case only the card title is printed without text data.
• Only А to Я and а to я cyrillic characters are decoded. Characters like № or ё are not decoded.

Text Encoding

Texts in the CRD files has 8-bit characters encoding, extended ASCII. This program can print UTF-8 characters converted from the Windows-1251 encoding. If your file has another encoding you can print in in a text file and decode with a text editor:

./ReadCrd Contacts.CRD > contacts.txt

Windows Terminal

Use the command chcp to display and change the code page used by the terminal. For example, to set the UTF-8 encoding use

chcp 65001
ReadCrd.exe -e Windows-1251 Contacts.CRD

Or set the Windows-1251 encoding

chcp 1251
ReadCrd.exe Contacts.CRD

Compilation

You need a C/C++ compiler.

From the Visual Studio Code documentation:

Most Linux distributions have the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) installed and macOS users can get the Clang tools with XCode.

On Windows: You can use this Mingw-w64 link to download the Windows Mingw-w64 installer.

Download and run the installer, which should be named mingw-w64-install.exe in your Download folder. Then add the path to your Mingw-w64 bin folder to the Windows PATH environment variable.

On Linux

Compile

gcc -o ReadCrd ReadCrd.c

Add the -s option to remove all symbol table and relocation information from the executable.

On Windows 10

Compile

gcc -o ReadCrd.exe ReadCrd.c

Thanks to

Jeff Parsons for Q99340: Windows 3.1 Card File Format at KnowledgeBaseArchive and ArchiveTeam/Cardfile - with file examples.