Procbyte - Binary Scripting Language / News: Recent posts

Sorry, but there just aren't enough short commands available (without further violating the case rules that I'm trying to straighten out) to not break backward compatibility and still add new commands. I'm now designing the language out in advance so that once the 0.9b release is made, the commands will be carved in stone. Example, is "P" good enough for all uses? "Pc", "Pw", "Pb", "Pk", "Pm", "Pg", "Pt", ... could stand for Pipe characters, words, blocks, KB, MB, GB, TB, etc, or you could be forced to do ",512*P" if you wanted to jump blocks with the single letter command and not have other options available. This will be settled soon as I want the next ffi release to be firmed up in its procb syntax. There will of course be simple conversion instructions provided (along the lines of -- use ",512*P" instead of "Pb") with the release. Only a few things may change.... read more

Procbyte is a tool to access binary files from shell programming. It has binary data handling, read/write capability, basic math and date conversions. It is intended to aid bash programming, but can be used from any command line tool or application.

The posted file may be compiled for an Athlon and may not run on lower intel x86 systems. I'm sure it'll run on Athlon or AMD-64 systems, but might not run even on Pentium-IV processors. If not simply type "cc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o procb procb.c" to recompile assuming you have gcc installed. Sorry about that, I've never had to worry about processor options when compiling before. If you have any trouble at all, don't hesitate to berate me and insist that I upload a proper distribution. I marked it as cross-platform because the C program should compile just about anywhere.... read more

OK, I decided to replace my PC with one I've been building for a few years and have had nothing by problems, works great -- until it locks solid; having a problem with CD/HD sharing a modified IDE cable with pin 39 cut; DMA issues, and a few other combined problems have kept me busy for weeks. I almost got away with posting the 2 month old files, but there were a few changes I wanted to make to commands that would cause issues if anyone used the old syntax, so after not touching it for exactly two months, I finally finished it tonight. Enjoy. (Even though you're welcome to complain:)... read more

OK, Sorry for the holdup, but I want to make sure the existing commands do not have to be changed in future releases, so I was putting it through a good design analysis when I got my new computer, so I'm a little tied up in getting the new system all set up. Since it's made up partly of the old system, I'm not productive till I get it all ready, so it'll be the middle of May before I get a release (or relief?).

Now with basic math functions. There might be a slight design change or two yet that results in a change of a command from one-byte to two and I don't want to release anything that would be incompatible with the final version. I also don't want to have any really stupid mistakes, like having a command in the help that isn't there :). After a basic walkthrough and some though about possible command changes, I'll get the beta posted. Unfortunately, I got almost to release and then got distracted and haven't been able to work on this in a couple weeks. Expect the beta release about the middle of April.... read more

Looking pretty solid. Might call this a 0.9 on the first shot. The executable's name has been changed to procb, but the project name remains the same.