Difference between foremost and scalpel?

Foremost and scalpel are both file carving utilities used to find files in raw images. The author of foremost, Jessie Kornblum, wrote the following in 2007:

Scalpel is a complete rewrite of Foremost version 0.69. It uses some
innovative techniques to make the carving of generic headers and
footers much faster under most conditions. The versions of foremost
written since then have some semantic carving techniques added. That
is, the user can specify all JPEG files for recovery. When
encountering a JPEG, the program uses the information in the JPEG
header to determine the file size and carve appropriately.

For example, let’s say each program is working on the same drive and
encounters a JPEG header. Scalpel will search for the first JPEG
footer it finds after this header and carve out the data between
those two points. Foremost will use the JPEG header to try and
determine how big the JPEG should be and start looking for the footer
at the appropriate offset.

See also

• Foremost
• Scalpel