Re: [SLE] Editing a binary file..

14 Dec 2001

      "Pascal Miquet"  writes:
...
I've got a binary file and I'd like to replace a pattern by another
string.  The SED command seems to do the job, but finaly the binary
file seems to not be correct :(
Original sed has been designed to work with text files only. If you
don't know the internals of your sed implementation then I don't
recommend you use it for binary files.

Perl can do the job. Instead of

$ sed -e 's/A/B/g'

use  

$ perl -p -e 's/A/B/g'

but it may read the whole binary file into memory. BTW: Emacs can also
be used.

It's also possible to convert the binary file into an ASCI file, use
sed and then convert it back to a binary file. I include a simple
example without any explanation:

bin2hex < file | sed -e '32s/0A/65/1' | hex2bin > new_file

$ cat bin2hex.c
#include 
int main()
{
  int c;
  while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
    printf("%02X\n", c);
  return 0;
}

$ cat hex2bin.c
#include 
int main()
{
  int c;
  while (scanf("%2X", &c) == 1)
    putchar(c);
  return 0;
}

--
Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se

Re: [SLE] Editing a binary file..

Alexandr Malusek