GNU poke Manual

Table of Contents

Next:   [Contents][Index]

GNU poke Manual

This manual describes GNU poke (version 0.1-beta, 15 September 2020).

Copyright © 2019, 2020 The poke authors.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

• Introduction  Introducing GNU poke. 

Using poke
• Basic Editing  Poking bits, bytes and simple data.
• Structuring Data  Poking your own abstractions.
• Debugging Poke Programs  When something goes wrong. 

Pickles
• Time  Handling time.
• Colors  Editing colors.
• Audio  Poking audio files. 

Advanced Pokology
• Writing Pickles  Sharing your abstractions the sane way. 

Reference Material
• Dot-Commands  Commanding the tool.
• Commands  Commands for editing data.
• Configuration  Tailoring the tool to your needs.
• The Poke Language  All you wanted to know about Poke.
• The Standard Library  Standard goodies for Poke programs.
• The Machine-Interface  Communicating your program with poke. 

Internals
• Hacking Poke  Extending poke.
• The Poke Virtual Machine  The PVM and its mysteries. 

Appendices
• Table of ASCII Codes  The ASCII character set.
• GNU Free Documentation License  Distribution terms for this document. 

Indexes
• Concept Index   



Here are some other nodes which are really subnodes of the ones
already listed, mentioned here so you can get to them in one step:

Introduction
• Motivation  Why a binary editor?
• Nomenclature  poke, Poke and pickles.
• Invoking poke  command line options.
• Commanding poke  Interactive and non-interactive usage. 

Basic Editing
• Binary Files  Text vs. binary.
• Files as IO Spaces  Poking files.
• Dumping File Contents  A first look at a file’s bytes.
• Poking Bytes  Reading, manipulating and writing bytes.
• Values and Variables  Values can be stored in variables.
• From Bytes to Integers  Building numbers with bytes.
• Big and Little Endians  Pick your egg.
• Negative Integers  Going behind zero.
• Weird Integers  Incomplete bytes in numbers.
• Unaligned Integers  IO spaces are bit-oriented.
• Integers of Different Sizes  Promotion of integers in expressions.
• Buffers as IO Spaces  Poking memory buffers.
• Copying Bytes  Moving data between IO spaces.
• Saving Buffers in Files  From memory to files.
• Character Sets  ASCII, Unicode, …
• From Bytes to Characters  Working with ASCII codes
• ASCII Strings  NULL-terminated strings.
• From Strings to Characters  Indexing strings. 

Structuring Data
• The SBM Format  The Stupid BitMap Format
• Poking a SBM Image  A need for abstraction.
• Modifying SBM Images  Modifying existing data.
• Defining Types  Abstracting data structures.
• Pickles  Pickling useful abstractions.
• Poking Structs  Abstracting heterogeneous data. 

Debugging Poke Programs
• __LINE__ and __FILE__  Error locations in traces. 

Time
• POSIX Time  Encoding POSIX dates. 

Colors
• The Color Registry  The color pickle.
• RGB24 Encoding  Encoding colors with three bytes. 

Audio
• MP3  Editing MP3 files. 

Advanced Pokology
• Writing Pickles  Sharing your abstractions the sane way. 

Dot-Commands
• load command  Loading pickles.
• file command  Opening and selecting file IO spaces.
• mem command  Opening and selecting memory IO spaces.
• nbd command  Opening and selecting NBD IO spaces.
• ios command  Switching between IO spaces.
• close command  Closing IO spaces.
• doc command  Online manual.
• editor command  Using an external editor for input.
• info command  Getting information about open files, etc.
• set command  Querying and setting global options.
• vm command  Poke Virtual Machine services.
• exit command  Exiting poke :( 

Commands
• dump  Binary dumps.
• copy  Copying data around.
• save  Save data into a file.
• extract  Extract contents of values to buffers. 

Configuration
• pokerc  User’s initialization file.
• Load Path  Determining location of modules.
• Styling  Changing the appearance of poke’s output. 

The Poke Language
• Integers  Whole numbers.
• Offsets  Memory sizes and offsets.
• Strings  NULL-terminated strings.
• Arrays  Homogeneous collections.
• Structs  Heterogeneous collections.
• Types  Declaring types.
• Assignments  Changing the value of variables.
• Compound Statements  Sequences of statements.
• Conditionals  Conditional statements and expressions.
• Loops  Statements to iterate on conditions.
• Expression Statements  Using expressions for their side-effects.
• Functions  Procedural abstraction.
• Endianness  Byte ordering.
• Mapping  Accessing IO spaces.
• Exception Handling  Dealing with exceptional conditions.
• Printing  Output in Poke programs.
• Comments  Documenting Poke programs.
• Modules  Loading pickles from Poke programs.
• System  Accessing the system from within Poke. 

The Standard Library
• Standard Integral Types  int, long and the like.
• Standard Offset Types  off64 and the like.
• Standard Units  b, B, Kb and the like.
• Conversion Functions  catos, atoi, etc.
• String Functions  Functions which deal with strings.
• Sorting Functions  qsort.
• CRC Functions  Cyclic Redundancy Checksums.
• Dates and Times  Processing and displaying dates and times. 

Hacking poke
• Writing Commands  Extending poke with new commands. 

The Machine-Interface
• MI overview  Description of the MI.
• Running poke in MI mode  Running poke with –mi
• MI transport  Frame messages.
• MI protocol  Messages, requests, responses, events. 

The Poke Virtual Machine
• PVM Instructions  Virtual Machine instructions.

Next:   [Contents][Index]