11–20 of 30 posts
I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
"llvm-readelf --elf-output-style=JSON | jq" is handy.
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I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
It is also easier for many people to remember how to navigate a GUI/TUI to achieve a task than to use the CLI, likely because it makes use of the parts of our brain for navigating space. This often makes them easier to use for tasks that you only do occasionally (at least until you learn how to take good notes, manage snippets, and work with your shell history).
So why a TUI instead of a GUI? Probably mostly for aesthetic and comfort reasons than for utility reasons - but I prefer staying in the terminal if possible, as I have a lot of control over its appearance and behavior, and TUIs generally have much better keyboard support than GUIs.
I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
One of the biggest benefits of a (good) TUI (or GUI) is that it guides someone who doesn't already know exactly what they want to do towards the most relevant information and the most common actions. Once you already know these things, it is usually faster and more powerful to work with code instead. With this TUI, someone who doesn't know very much about the internals of a binary gets that information presented them…
Also it is much easier to run remotely and doesn't need half a gigabyte of dependencies making it easier on a VPS etc
I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
One of the biggest benefits of a (good) TUI (or GUI) is that it guides someone who doesn't already know exactly what they want to do towards the most relevant information and the most common actions. Once you already know these things, it is usually faster and more powerful to work with code instead. With this TUI, someone who doesn't know very much about the internals of a binary gets that information presented them…
> So why a TUI instead of a GUI?
Also, TUI is available in constrained environments and over SSH/serial.
NB: the author's GitHub contribution graph is pure green for several years! https://github.com/orhun
I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
One of the biggest benefits of a (good) TUI (or GUI) is that it guides someone who doesn't already know exactly what they want to do towards the most relevant information and the most common actions. Once you already know these things, it is usually faster and more powerful to work with code instead. With this TUI, someone who doesn't know very much about the internals of a binary gets that information presented them…
I don't really get why this is a TUI. Any time I actually hack on this sort of stuff, I'd rather have the outputs (eg. symbols, ELF sections/segments, strings, ...) directly on stdout so I can then further filter stuff or otherwise process it. Especially strings! The only part of this tool that seems to merit a TUI is the hex view...
Ie for this, switching between readelf and objdump options, a handful of operations are already getting you 1000 lines into scrollback. I imagine having one terminal with this up and pre-parsed could be useful on the side while doing other analysis.
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A reminder of why it’s good to analyze your project’s binaries. Test data, famously, but also firmware blobs, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, an explanation would be nice, or perhaps a demonstration of whatever he has in mind that involves xz. That would make for a good demo.
The demo screencaps are of the xz binary.