| Title: | Dimke Monitor - Hex Viewer |
| Picture: |  |
| Explanation: |
This Perl script helps you examine any file on the server when invoked from
a terminal / console window. The file, either plain text or binary, is beeing displayed
in 3 columns, first the file offset, followed by the values in hexadecimal and in the
rightmost column you see the ascii values of any byte that can be displayed properly. If you are familiar with any other hex viewer then it will be trivial for you. The original intention was to look inside ascii files to determine whether or not they had been transmitted correctly between different Unix and micro$oft platforms, i.e. if the "0d" to "0d 0a" assignment during the ftp transfer was accomplished properly or not. |
| How it works: |
Monitor was originally written in C for Xenix but now I converted it to Perl as I had to see
that GCC / CC is not available on every Unix machine, but in most cases Perl is installed.
When started, monitor first looks into the ARG-value to see, what file you want to be displayed. If the file cannot be found and opened for reading, you will receive an error message. If no filename or a "-" is provided then monitor will read from stdin instead. This is very useful to just combine monitor with some application which displayes raw data. So you only have to redo the last command and write "| monitor" behind. |
| How to use: |
Unpack the zip file into any directory accessible under your account, but we recommend NOT
to use your cgi directory to prevent people from playing around with it. Then make "monitor" executeable by chmod-ing it like "chmod 700 monitor" so that at least you as the owner can run it. The first line of the script contains "#!/usr/bin/perl" which tells the shell in which you invoke it to use the perl interpreter for execution. So you can run the script just by calling it directly from the command line, for instance "./monitor file_name". Or, and this is the recommended way, append the directory in which you copied it to, to the search path variable within your ~/.profile file. E.g. add the line "export PATH=$PATH:/full/path/to/tools" where monitor is located. So "monitor" can be accessed under your account from any directory in the same way you invoke any system command. Example: "monitor favicon.ico" |
| Download Source: | monitor.zip |