How to edit binary file on Unix systems

Question

On Windows machines there are lots of third party editors available to edit a binary file.

Any idea how can I edit a binary file on Unix system?

Solution 1

You can also try ghex2 GNOME utilities. This give you the automated hex-to-ASCII on the side, as well as the various character/integer decodes at the bottom.
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Solution 2

In vim You can type :%!xxd to turn it into a hexeditor. :%!xxd -r to go back to normal mode. xxd is shipped in a vim installation.

See here for some remarks about editing binary files with vim (boils down to :set binary to avoid trouble, use only the "R" or "r" command to change text, don't delete characters).

If You are an Emacs fan, see here for a guide on how to edit a binary file with Emacs.

Solution 3

There are much more hexeditors on Linux/Unix....

I use hexedit on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install hexedit

Solution 4

you can check wikipedia.

I prefer BIEW especially.

Solution 5

Bless is a high quality, full featured hex editor.

It is written in mono/Gtk# and its primary platform is GNU/Linux. However it should be able to run without problems on every platform that mono and Gtk# run. Main Features Bless currently provides the following features:

• Efficient editing of large data files and block devices.
• Multilevel undo - redo operations.
• Customizable data views.
• Fast data rendering on screen.
• Multiple tabs.
• Fast find and replace operations.
• A data conversion table.
• Advanced copy/paste capabilities.
• Highlighting of selection pattern matches in the file.
• Plugin based architecture.
• Export of data to text and html (others with plugins).
• Bitwise operations on data.
• A comprehensive user manual.

copied from http://home.gna.org/bless/

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Comments

[Shannon Nelson]

Yes, this works, but it is more difficult to use because you need to work at keeping the xxd text formatted properly, and the ASCII decode on the side isn't automatic.

[Paweł Polewicz]

More difficult than what? I'd like to remind that the question was about hexeditors shipped with *nix. Console users don't have much choice.

[Hemant]

Thanks. it present on my sunos system. any thing on hpux ?

[Shannon Nelson]

I don't know what all is on HPux, but since it is open source software you could probably find the source, compile and install it yourself.

[Adam Trhon]

I removed the offensive statement (try to avoid these) and added info about used GUI toolkit (found on your website). Hope it's OK.

[HRJ]

Thanks for the wikipedia link. I liked Hexditor.jar

[raj_gt1]

I would have loved it if copy-paste would have working. I am using ghex v2.5 and it only paste one byte at a time. is there a way to bulk copy paste ??

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

@ShannonNelson I agree. Also have a look at bvi, sudo apt-get install bvi , which is ncurses and uses vim-like shortcuts.

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

In particular, you can't add or remove bytes from the middle easily: stackoverflow.com/questions/27086771/…

[Viktor Vix Jančík]

Hexinator is pretty good, but I like 010Editor best though

[rr-]

I see this trick recommended all over the place and it makes me sad. You can't search for anything that happens to span two or more visual lines, you can't easily go to specific offset, the editing is inferior (can't input floats for example), can't delete or insert new bytes without screwing everything up... what can you do besides flipping bytes?

[yugr]

@rr It's more than enough when you found offending snippet in objdump's output and need to simply nop it out in executable. I'd +100 this if I could.

[Michael Martinez]

Excellent solution. vim -b. I used it to change the soname on some shared library dependencies in an executable and worked perfectly.

[Shai Alon]

Moved to here: github.com/afrantzis/bless

[Peter Mortensen]

The link is broken: "Page not found"

[Peter Mortensen]

What is the reason for "via the menu"? What happens if you don't?