jackdesbwa / hextools

Hexadecimal console tools

Hexadecimal console utilities

Build

There are one-file code without any special library needed. Thus it can simply be built with default make rules. For example, to build "livehex" just execute "make livehex".

livehex

Livehex prints the bytes incomming from its standard input to their hexadecimal notation on its standard output. It is similar to "od -t x1" except that the data are not buffered.

This allows to analyse a stream which has low throughput without having to wait for a complete 16 bytes emission.

For example,

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/stdout count=20 bs=1 2>/dev/null | ./livehex

produces this kind of output

0000000: 7C C9 7D 59 F9 AE F4 FB  8C 49 75 7B 69 EE CC F7 
0000010: D4 DA 32 F3

bin2hex

Bin2hex performs similar operation than livehex, but the output format is different. It prints hexadecimal values separated by spaces without any other presentation characters, except that each read batch is separated by a new line character. This can be useful in interactive programs.

With the command

echo -ne "\x1\x23\x45\x67\x89\xab\xcd\xef" | ./bin2hex

output is

 01 23 45 67 89 AB CD EF

hex2bin

Hex2bin transforms standard input hexadecimal values to binary values. The hex values can be formatted in various formats such as AA, aa, 0xAA, 0Xaa, 0xAa, etc. and must be separated by spaces. A non-hexadecimal character stops evaluation of the line.

With the command

echo "1 23 0x45 0X67 89 ab CD          eF" | ./hex2bin | od -t x1

output is

0000000 01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef
0000010

schex

Schex is a utility specially designed to be used with socat. It is like a bin2hex from fd 3 to stderr and a hex2bin from stdin to stdout.

For example, the following command opens a tcp server on port 1234 with socat. Incoming binary data are translated to hexadecimal and typing hexadecial send answer back translated into binary.

socat tcp-listen:1234,reuseaddr exec:./schex,fdin=3