Printable View
I am having Microsoft windows operating system installed on my desktop. Few days back I have installed a Cygnus hex editor. Whenever I open an executable files it gets opened in Cygnus editor. After opening the files there are some alphanumeric, special characters. I am unaware of these files and their appropriate functions. I want a solution that will help me to understand the different hex editors and also about their functions.
A hex editor is a small type of computer program that allows user to change the machine language which makes up the files that the computer understands. Hex editor that are designed in such a way that they can read and edit sectors of hard disk and floppy drive. User can install hex editor to read, write and extract some contents of a file. Many of the hex editors show the data from a file in the hexadecimal format thus they are represented as 4 groups of 4 bytes.
You can access the main memory of RAM using the HxD editor. HxD editor can edit and modify the files of main memory without having any limitation of the file size. It has a very easy user interface which helps us to search, replace, export, checksum, insertion of byte, file shredder, concatenation and much more. The drive and memory are represented in the same way as files. Thus drives and memory can be edited in the same way as files edited with an undo function so that they can be returned back to the previous stage. HxD is freely available and is very easy to install. HxD can export data to several other format such as plain text, html etc.
Suppose that you have opened an executable file in the hex editor you are having installed on you system. The code in the executable file is compiled and you don’t get the plain text as output. After the compilation you will get a code which is represented in a low level language which only the machine can understand. So after the compilation of code of the executable you can access the physical storage media such as USB, hard disk, floppy disk etc. depending upon which type of editor you are using.
Hex editor is a program which allows you to edit compiled executable files. Hex editor are sometimes useful to remove copy protection and also it can be used by hacker to cheat a computer system. One of the most powerful hex editors available is known as frhed hex editor. Frhed hex editor is an open source which can load small programs very fast, edit binary values, compare files and also can be used to read hard disk sector.
On UNIX or Linux platform Heme Hex Editor is used. Heme Hex Editor is very fast and portable console editor for these platforms. It is having undo operation, can fill any range of addresses with the byte specified. It is also having the find function which enables it to search a single byte or a whole character string. Another editors you can use on UNIX/LINUX platform is Shed (Simple Hex Editor). It is having very simple user interface and displays each byte as ascii, hex, decimal. Provides search facility and can dump a file. It can handles files up to 2GB and requires very small memory.