NAME

pixd —

colourful binary file visualizer

SYNOPSIS

pixd [-r range] [-w width] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

pixd visualizes binary data by mapping each octet to a colour according to a palette, displaying the octet at a given number of columns per line. pixd will process the files specified as arguments, or standard input if none are provided.

Note that pixd uses 24-bit colour SGR sequences and the U+2580 UPPER HALF BLOCK glyph for rendering. This means that your terminal emulator needs to support both Unicode and 24-bit colour sequences.

The default palette maps the high nibble into a hue, and the low nibble into a brightness value. The hues used are black (0x00), red-orange (0x01..0x1F), yellow (0x20..0x3F), green (0x40..0x7F), cyan-blue (0x80..0xBF), purple-pink (0xC0..0xFE), and white (0xFF).

OPTIONS

If no file operands are specified, standard input is read instead. Available options are listed below.

-r range: Range of octets to print from each file. Specified as either start-end or start+count, where start and end/count are positive integers specified in either decimal, hexadecimal or octal (C-style notation).
When the former syntax is used, both ends of the range are optional and default to the start or end of the file when omitted.
-w width: Number of octets per line, separated into groups (see -g). Set to 64 by default.

ENVIRONMENT

PIXD_COLORS can be used to override the colour palette. If set, it should consist of 256 whitespace-separated hex colours; each colour has to be exactly 6 hexadecimal digits representing a 24-bit colour (e.g. FFFF00 for yellow).

EXAMPLES

Here are some examples of useful uses of hexd's features.

pixd -r0x1000+0x200 foo.bin: Display the 512-byte range in 'foo.bin' starting at offset 0x1000. Useful when files contain other embedded files/formats at a certain location (e.g. archive files).
pixd -r-0x400 *.bin: Show the first 1024 bytes of each of the *.bin files, with a heading above each file (if more than one). This is useful for example to compare headers of several samples of an unknown format.
curl -s http://example.com | pixd | less -R: pixd works as a filter, too. For paging, less(1)'s -R flag is useful.

AUTHORS

Written by Jonas ‘FireFly’ Höglund.