On Tue, 3 May 2011, Joachim Gwoke wrote:
>Ever visit the people at http://www.woodmann.com? They might offer
>some more answers.
No, I wasn't aware of them. Thanks for the pointer.
Dave
>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
>
--
Dave Anderson
<[email protected]>
