After three years of development, the first release of GNU Poke, an interactive binary data editor, is presented. Unlike dump editors, which allow you to edit information at the bit and byte level, Poke provides a full-fledged language for describing and parsing data structures, making it possible to automatically encode and decode data in different formats.
Once a binary data structure has been defined, for example, based on a list of supported formats, the user can perform search, inspection, and modification operations at a higher level by manipulating abstract structures such as ELF character tables, MP3 tags, DWARF expressions, and table entries. disk partitions. A library of ready-made descriptions for various formats is provided.
The program may be useful for debugging and testing projects such as linkers, assemblers, and executable compression utilities, for reverse engineering, for parsing and documenting data formats and protocols, and for building other utilities that manipulate binary data, such as diff and patch for binary files.
Source: opennet.ru