Friday 15 July 2011

Editing binaries using bvi

I don't want to start a vi vs emacs holy war, but I have found a wonderful binary editor based on the vi command set.  The bvi editor is great for tweaking binary files - one can tab between the hex and ASCII representations of the binary data to re-edit the data.

To install use:

sudo apt-get install bvi

As well as basic vi commands, bvi contains bit-level operations to and/or/xor/not/shift bits too.   One has to use ':set memmove' to insert/delete data as this is not enabled by default.

Anyhow, install, consult the man page and get editing binary files!

1 comment:

  1. I use "hexer" instead of bvi

    NOTE: it was completely broken before version 0.1.5 (Ubuntu 10.04)

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