Quick question abour rtf and virii

This may not be on the correct board :/ but please humor me and shed a little light on this. I downloaded an .rtf file off a P2P program, it has only 5 lines of text but it's 25 KB. My virus program isn't picking up anything, but... what I'm basically asking is if there is any way for hackers to write malicious code into an .rtf file (like the danger with .doc macros and such?) I know there is something sitting there besides those 5 pathetic lines of text, but I don't want my comp to blow up ;/ any help?

 

Rich text files (.rtf) do not contain macros, so there's no possibility of getting a macro virus from an actual .rtf file.

That being said, I'm not sure of the behavior of Word or WordPad if you take a normal .doc file with a macro virus and rename it as an .rtf file (but it's still in .doc format). Word might try to be smart and read the file as a .doc file since that's the format the file actually is. Doing this would possibly run any macro viruses.

An easy workaround is to open the .rtf file in a plain text editor such as Notepad, Araneae, or UltraEdit. The file format for .rtf is such that it doesn't conceal the file contents the way .doc files do. There will be some formatting codes in the file, but the text will be largely readable.