- Historically, .PIT file extension was most commonly used in Macintosh file compression. Before Mac got onboard with the industry-standard .ZIP format for compressed files, they used a variety of proprietary compression methods. One of the most popular was PackIt, which saved archives with the .PIT extension.
- PC users may have trouble opening or extracting .PIT compressed archive files, not only because it's traditionally a Mac-only format, but because it's obsolete. The .PIT style of compression has not been used for several years, as modern Macintosh operating systems support the universally used .ZIP method of compression.
Because PackIt is no longer actively used by any platform, advanced compression and decompression utilities may not offer support for the .PIT format. Software developers may not see .PIT compatibility as a requirement because the format is obsolete. Popular third-party compression/decompression utilities such as PeaZip and TUGZip did not offer support for .PIT files as of late 2009.
If you need to extract a .PIT file (or if you want to convert from .PIT to a more modern compression format) you may need to open the file on an older Macintosh system (a system with PackIt software), and then transfer the files to a newer machine for use or archiving as a .ZIP file. - If you hear somebody talking about "pit files," don't automatically assume he is refering to files with a .PIT file extension. He may mean files used in the Peach Fuzzing Platform. Peach Fuzzing is "a SmartFuzzer capable of ... both generation and mutation based fuzzing" of data, according to the developers.
Data fuzzing is a means of system testing in which invalid data is deliberately generated and given to a program or platform as input. In this way, developers can see whether their program's integrity holds up against various types of invalid input.
The Peach Fuzzing Platform uses "peach pit" files to define and structure the data set in a relational way. With this relational data, the fuzz testing becomes more authentic, as the platform "knows" what kind of invalid data might be generated in real-world scenarios. - Many software packages are custom-built for specific corporations or obscure business processes. This is particularly true in medical and billing/financial sectors. Because such programs are not mainstream, information about their file extensions and internal workings are often not published online. If you work with such software, you may find that the developer has used acronyms to come up with logical file extensions.
In the case of PIT, examples of acronyms that would logically call for the use of a .PIT file extension for data files or scripts include Personal Income Tax, Point in Time, Principal Interest Taxes, Programmable Interval Timer, Post-Installation Test, Potential Impacts Table, Part-Time/Intermittent/Temporary Employee(s) and Programmer Integration Testing. - It's important to note that .PIT files can be used for anything at any time by anyone. Any computer user can rename a text file from "README.TXT" to "README.PIT" -- there's nobody stopping you from doing so, and the file would still be a valid text file. There is no universal standard for creating or using file extensions, so a developer is free to use .PIT to name her database, 3D model, uncompiled code or absolutely anything else. New software is developed every day, and this means it's entirely possible that we will see .PIT files reemerge as a popular format at some point in the future.
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