Ever visit the people at http://www.woodmann.com? They might offer some more answers.
regards Joachim On 5/3/11, Alexander Hall <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
