My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I’ve tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.
I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?
You earned the following block. You make foolish assumptions. The header is garbled in Linux entirely there is nothing available to extract with any tools.
You don’t understand how file formats work I guess. You can’t just ‘head’ an encoded file and expect a terminal to output what you want. Do some research.