30 Jul
2004
30 Jul
'04
8:51 a.m.
Silly question, but maybe someone here's found a nice way of doing this
using standard Unix tools...
I have a few files in hex format (actually ROM dumps) and want to
convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the hexdump utility. I'm
not aware of a standard (and probably on-topic!) Unix util to do this,
but maybe someone knows if there is one, or a handy way of doing this
using some of the standard text-processing utils that Unix has...
(files are in the format of 16 pairs of uppercase hex digits per line,
with a trailing space after every pair - even the last one on a line)
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I need to remember some C
again - and I've only just finished emptying my brain of it after the
last time I needed to code in it a couple of months ago :-)
cheers
Jules
30 Jul
30 Jul
9:31 a.m.
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:51:52 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I have a few files in hex format (actually ROM dumps)
and want to
convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the hexdump utility. I'm
not aware of a standard (and probably on-topic!) Unix util to do this,
awk(1) is
your friend.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
10:08 a.m.
> I have a few files in hex format (actually ROM
dumps) and want to
> convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the hexdump utility. I'm
> not aware of a standard (and probably on-topic!) Unix util to do this,
awk(1) is your friend.
I'd pick perl(1) myself ... this is standard on just about all modern Un*ces
of any flavour.
--
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- CONJUGATION OF THE HULKING ENTOMOLOGIST: I big / I bag / I have bug --------
10:31 a.m.
Rumor has it that Cameron Kaiser may have mentioned these words:
My opinion - if you already know perl, then I'd agree, but if you'd have to
learn it anyway, skip it and learn python(1) _if it exists on the system_.
For me, the learning curve was about 50% shorter than learning perl, and
more recently is just as "standard" as perl, as a *lot* of system utils are
being written in it now.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Randomization is better!!!
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
> I have a
few files in hex format (actually ROM dumps) and want to
> convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the hexdump utility. I'm
> not aware of a standard (and probably on-topic!) Unix util to do this,
awk(1) is your friend.
I'd pick perl(1) myself ... this is standard on just about all modern Un*ces
of any flavour.
12:09 p.m.
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:08:19 -0700 (PDT)
Cameron Kaiser <spectre(a)floodgap.com> wrote:
At least on my favorite Unix, NetBSD, perl(1) is an option
that needs to
be installed separately. awk(1) is "everywhere".
\begin{personal opinion}
Also: I did some small work in perl(1) and came to the conclusion that
perl(1) is a disease and should be eliminated from the universe. ;-)
\end{personal opinion}
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
awk(1) is your
friend.
I'd pick perl(1) myself ... this is standard on just about all modern
Un*ces of any flavour.
8:52 p.m.
awk(1) is your friend.
I'd pick perl(1)
myself ... this is standard on just about all modern
Un*ces of any flavour. 
11:25 a.m.
Silly question, but maybe someone here's found a
nice way of doing
this using standard Unix tools...
I have a few files in hex format (actually ROM dumps)
and want to
convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the hexdump utility.
I haven't found a way to do this with standard tools. I'd use two
small tools I wrote long ago: one to convert hex to decimal, the other
to go from character codes to the characters themselves.
Both are up for anonymous ftp from ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca, the
base-converter in /mouse/hacks/cvtbase.c and the converter from codes
to characters in /mouse/local/src/charcode/ (the latter also includes a
converter to go the other way).
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
12:05 p.m.
This is a fun thing to try as a "1st year" programming assignment.
As far as making it standard, there's too many possible output formats
to try to anticipate. Know the format that you plan use and the complexity
of the program falls away. Try to be aware of null suppression and other
output compression defaults and turn them off.
I grabbed a copy of KERMIT.EXE for VAX in ~1983 by capturing a $DUMP
stream and deformatting it in this way. Very gratifying.
John A.
5:41 p.m.
Silly question, but maybe someone here's found a nice way of doing this
using standard Unix tools...
I am not aware of a standard unix utility to do this, but it shouldn't be
too hard to do it in perl or C.
(files are in the format of 16 pairs of uppercase hex
digits per line,
with a trailing space after every pair - even the last one on a line)
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I need to remember some C
again - and I've only just finished emptying my brain of it after the
last time I needed to code in it a couple of months ago :-)
I know that when I wanted to convert some ROM dumps to/from Intel-hex
format, it didn't take me long to knock up a rough-and-ready pair of
programs to do this (rough-and-ready meaning that they assumed that
intelhex lines were less than 256 characters long -- which is certainly
the case with my (commercial) EPROM programmer), etc).
And I am not a programmer...
-tony
6:42 p.m.
On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 21:41, Tony Duell wrote:
I know that when I wanted to convert some ROM dumps
to/from Intel-hex
format, it didn't take me long to knock up a rough-and-ready pair of
programs to do this (rough-and-ready meaning that they assumed that
intelhex lines were less than 256 characters long -- which is certainly
the case with my (commercial) EPROM programmer), etc).
That's what I've ended up with actually - at least for going from hex to
binary. Hexdump handles the other way around quite happily!
I dislike writing C, but I dislike writing Perl even more :-)
I couldn't figure out a good way of doing this with awk - I'm capable of
writing some awk to format output, but not to actual interpret data, do
calculations with it, and spit it out in a different format...
Anyway, problem solved. It's a stop-gap measure as the comms software I
have under Linux doesn't like capturing binary data from the EPROM
programmer, so I have to dump stuff in hex format (but would rather have
stored on the PC in binary format). I'll sort out a better method
sometime ('cat /dev/serialport > file' would be nice!)
cheers
Jules
9 p.m.
I guess you have hex digit as input, not prefixed by 0x (if they are,
remove the string "0x" from the x= statement. Maybe that code might
help :
awk --non-decimal-data 'BEGIN {RS=" ";} {x="0x"$0;
s=""; while (x > 0)
{ s=and(x,1)""s; x=rshift(x,1); } print s}'
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f as input will print :
0
1
10
11
100
101
110
111
1000
1001
1010
1011
1100
1101
1110
1111
you can put your own code after the x= statement I guess.
Stephane
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 22:42:51 +0000, Jules Richardson
<julesrichardsonuk(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 21:41, Tony Duell wrote:
...
That's what I've ended up with actually - at
least for going from hex to
binary. Hexdump handles the other way around quite happily!
...
I couldn't figure out a good way of doing this
with awk - I'm capable of
writing some awk to format output, but not to actual interpret data, do
calculations with it, and spit it out in a different format...
...
31 Jul
31 Jul
2:32 p.m.
Look as srecord ( http://srecord.sourceforge.net ).
It's a powerful command-line tool for converting and
filtering object files in a large number of formats.
It can easily convert between various hex formats and
binary. I think it's a must-have program.
Dave
--- Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk(a)yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
Silly question, but maybe someone here's found a
nice way of doing this
using standard Unix tools...
I have a few files in hex format (actually ROM
dumps) and want to
convert them to binary. Sort of the reverse of the
hexdump utility. I'm
not aware of a standard (and probably on-topic!)
Unix util to do this,
but maybe someone knows if there is one, or a handy
way of doing this
using some of the standard text-processing utils
that Unix has...
(files are in the format of 16 pairs of uppercase
hex digits per line,
with a trailing space after every pair - even the
last one on a line)
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I need to
remember some C
again - and I've only just finished emptying my
brain of it after the
last time I needed to code in it a couple of months
ago :-)
cheers
Jules
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11 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
allain＠panix.com -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
dfnr2＠yahoo.com -
jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
mouse＠Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
stephane.tsacas＠gmail.com -
zmerch＠30below.com