doctor-love/fq

jq for binary formats

fq

Tool, language and decoders for inspecting binary data.

In most cases fq works the same way as jq but instead of reading JSON it reads binary data. The result is a JSON compatible structures where each value has a bit range, symbolic interpretations and know how to be presented in a useful way.

You can pronounce the name as you wish, i pronounce jq /‘dʒei’kju:/ so I usually prefer /‘ef’kju:/.

NOTE: fq is early in development and many things are missing, broken or do not make sense. That also means there is a great opportunity to help out!

Goals

• Make binary formats accessible and queryable.
• Nested formats and bit-oriented decoding.
• Quick and comfortable CLI tool.
• Bit and byte transformations and conversions.
• Programmer's calculator.

Hopes

• Make it useful enough that people want to help improve it.
• Inspire people to create similar tools.

Usage

Basic usage is fq . file.

For details see usage.md

Install

Download release for your platform, unarchive it and move the executable to PATH etc.

Homebrew

# install latest release
brew install wader/tap/fq

Arch Linux

fq can be installed from the community repository using pacman:

pacman -S fq

You can also build and install the development (VCS) package using an AUR helper:

paru -S fq-git

Nix

nix-shell -p fq

FreeBSD

Use the fq port.

Alpine

Currently in edge testing but should work fine in stable also.

apk add -X http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing fq

Build from source

Make sure you have go 1.17 or later installed.

To install directly from git repository do:

# build and install latest release
go install github.com/wader/fq@latest

# or build and install latest master
go install github.com/wader/fq@master

# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp "$(go env GOPATH)/bin/fq" /usr/local/bin

To build and run tests from source directory:

make test fq
# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp fq /usr/local/bin
# it's also possible to use go run
go run fq.go

Supported formats

aac_frame, adts, adts_frame, apev2, ar, av1_ccr, av1_frame, av1_obu, avc_annexb, avc_au, avc_dcr, avc_nalu, avc_pps, avc_sei, avc_sps, bencode, bsd_loopback_frame, bson, bzip2, dns, dns_tcp, elf, ether8023_frame, exif, flac, flac_frame, flac_metadatablock, flac_metadatablocks, flac_picture, flac_streaminfo, gif, gzip, hevc_annexb, hevc_au, hevc_dcr, hevc_nalu, icc_profile, icmp, id3v1, id3v11, id3v2, ipv4_packet, jpeg, json, matroska, mp3, mp3_frame, mp4, mpeg_asc, mpeg_es, mpeg_pes, mpeg_pes_packet, mpeg_spu, mpeg_ts, ogg, ogg_page, opus_packet, pcap, pcapng, png, protobuf, protobuf_widevine, pssh_playready, raw, sll2_packet, sll_packet, tar, tcp_segment, tiff, udp_datagram, vorbis_comment, vorbis_packet, vp8_frame, vp9_cfm, vp9_frame, vpx_ccr, wav, webp, xing, zip

For details see formats.md

TODO and ideas

See TODO.md

Development

See dev.md

Thanks and related projects

This project would not have been possible without itchyny's jq implementation gojq. I also want to thank HexFiend for inspiration and ideas and stedolan for inventing the jq language.

Similar or related projects:

• HexFiend
• binspector
• kaitai
• Wireshark (specially tshark -T json)
• MediaInfo (specially mediainfo --Output=JSON and mediainfo --Details=1)
• GNU poke
• ffmpeg/ffprobe
• hexdump