how to edit binary file on the unix systems.

Question

On windows machine there are lots of third party editors available to edit a binary file. I belive there should be some thing similer buildin in the *nix systems as well. any idea how can i edit a binary file on unix?

Answer 1

you can check wikipedia.

I prefer BIEW especially.

Answer 2

with Vim or Emacs.

Answer 3

There's lightweight binary editor, check hexedit. http://www.linux.org/apps/AppId_6968.html. I tried using it for editing ELF binaries in Linux at least.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 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/

Answer 6

For small changes, I have used hexedit:

http://rigaux.org/hexedit.html

Simple but fast and useful.

Answer 7

I like KHexEdit, which is part of KDE

Its "Windows style" UI is probably quite quick to learn for most people (compared to Vim or Emacs anyway :)

(Right click and 'View image' for full-size screenshot)

Answer 8

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

I use hexedit on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install hexedit