On 05/02/11 23:50, Dave Anderson wrote: > Sorry to bother you all, but I'm failing miserably at searching for a > tool to help analyze the structure of arbitrary files (prefereably one > which runs on OpenBSD). > > I've got a device which exports data in a undocumented format and the > only program available to use that data doesn't do what I need, so I > need to figure out the file formats so I can communicate with the device > the way I need to. > > What I'm looking for is an interactive program which makes it easy to > look at selected parts of a file (individual items, sets of items > located at regular intervals, sets of items linked by pointers or > offsets, etc) in any of many formats (ascii, unicode, int, double float, > etc) and either endianness, store comments about items or sets of items > in an aux file, store names for various values in particular items and > display those items values using those names, search for patterns at > regular intervals or linked by pointers or offsets, etc, etc, etc; all > those things which make it easier to discover and keep track of the > structure of an unknown file. > > It's hard to believe that nobody has ever written such a program, but > I've been unable to find one. Any suggestions for effective searches or > for suitable programs would be appreciated.
Without a terribly skilled mathematician and tons of luck I would expect such a program to be close to impossible to create, or at least require tons of CPU time and data to perform the observations on, to come up with a reasonably reliable result. However, since I am not a terribly skilled matematician myself, I may be totally wrong. Meanwhile, file(1) comes to mind. :-) $ file /etc/pwd.db /etc/pwd.db: Berkeley DB 1.85 (Hash, version 2, native byte-order) > Thanks, > > Dave
