How to open binary file

11 Best Free Bin File Opener For Windows

Here is a List Of Best Free Bin File Opener Software for Windows. These software let you extract BIN file on your computer for free.

BIN files or Binary files belong to Disk Image File type category. These files were used in the past as disk images. At times, you may need to open or extract BIN files, which cannot be opened directly in File Explorer. For this, you can make use of various free software available to Open BIN files.

The BIN file extractor software mentioned here let you select BIN files and extract them to a desired location on your PC. Some of these software let you convert BIN to ISO and other image formats. You can also encrypt BIN files using some. There are also options to burn image file to disc. Using some of the listed BIN opener, you can repair BIN files and create new archive files as well. The software mentioned have several other useful features. Go checkout the list to know more about the listed freeware and also know How To Open Bin Files or How To Extract BIN Files.

My Favorite BIN File Opener:

I like AnyBurn the most as a freeware to open BIN files. Why? It not only lets you extract BIN files, but lets you Burn image to disc, burn audio CD from audio files, convert image files, edit image files, create bootable USB drive, and much more. For extraction of BIN files, it has several options to choose from. Continue reading to know more.

You can also checkout the list of Best Free ISO Extractor Software, Best Free ISO Maker Software, and Best Free Blu Ray Player Software.

AnyBurn

AnyBurn is a free BIN file extractor which has various other tools related to Image files. The main interface displays all the options, which includes: Burn Image to disc, Burn audio CD, Copy disc to image file, Rip audio CD, Extract Image file, Convert image files, create bootable USB drive, etc.

To open and extract BIN file, click on the Extract image file option; a new window will open. There you can browse and extract image files, such as BIN, CUE, ISO, IMG, etc. You can choose to open the folder after extraction, extract selected files, overwrite existing files, etc.

Two Ways to View a Binary File on Windows Without Installing Anything

Display hexadecimal code and its ASCII equivalent side-by-side

Two Ways to View a Binary File on Windows Without Installing Anything

There are times when you may need to view the contents of a binary file, such as, a file that is either a computer program or a data file. While you can of course look for a free binary or hexadecimal viewer, such a route requires you to download and install a third-party program on the system, something that you may either not want to do (eg, you have limited disk space, or you don’t want to take the risk of installing a program from an unknown source) or cannot do (eg, this is a company or client’s computer, so you can’t just go around installing programs on a whim).

The good news is that you don’t actually need to install any third-party program to view binary files. Windows already comes with programs that can take a file (binary or otherwise), and translate it to show hexadecimal code along with its printable (displayable) ASCII equivalent (if any) side-by-side. (Scroll down to see the screenshots if you don’t know what I mean.)

Method 1 (Windows 10): Using PowerShell’s Format-Hex Cmdlet

This method requires PowerShell 5.0 or above, which comes preinstalled on Windows 10. If you use an earlier version of Windows, see method 2 instead. (You can of course install PowerShell 5+ on those versions too, but that defeats the purpose of not installing anything.)

Click the Start menu button and type «powershell» (without the quotation marks). The words «Windows PowerShell» will appear at the top of the menu. Click it.

A window will open, leaving you at a command prompt with something like » PS C:\Users\christopherheng> » just before your text cursor. The actual words following «Users\» will differ, depending on your Windows account name.

Go to the directory containing the file you want to view. You can change directories by typing «cd» followed by the full directory name. For example, if you want to view a file in the «c:\Program Files\Windows Mail» directory, type

If you want to return to the default directory you were in when you first opened PowerShell, type:

In all cases, after typing the command, you will have to hit the ENTER key before PowerShell will act on your instructions.

In general the command to view a file called (say) «file.exe» is «format-hex file.exe» (without the quotation marks). However, if you do that, and your file is larger than a few bytes or so, the contents will be dumped in one fell swoop onto the screen, scrolling off at great speed, until the entire file has been displayed.

As such, you will probably want to send the output to a program called «more» which will let you see the contents one screenful at a time. To do that, type the following instead:

As always, when working on the command line, you will need to type the ENTER key after the command before PowerShell will act on your instructions. If your filename has spaces in it, put quotation marks around it, like this:

The «|» character, called a «pipe» in this context, sends the output of format-hex as though through a pipe (hence the name) to another program called «more». The latter lets you page forward through the file, one screenful or one line at a time.

To see the next screenful, type the space bar on your keyboard. To scroll up only one line, use the ENTER key. There is no way to scroll back. If you actually need to go back to an earlier screen, one way is to quit the program and redo the command again. To terminate the program before you reach the end of the file (eg, if you have already found what you were looking for, or if you accidentally paged forward past the part you wanted to see and needed to start again), type «q» (without the quotation marks) to quit.

When you are done, close PowerShell by typing «exit» (without the quotation marks), followed by the ENTER key. Alternatively, you can also click the «x» button on the top right hand side of the window in the usual way.

If «More» is Too Limited for Your Needs

While «more» is generally useful for viewing a file one screenful at a time, if you need to page up and down repeatedly, its inability to scroll back can be very frustrating.

In such a case, it may be worth the effort to save the output that «format-hex» produces as a text file, so that you can use a normal plain text editor like Notepad to view it.

To do this, use the following command line instead:

This produces a file called «file.txt», which you can open with any text editor. The greater-than sign, » > «, causes the output of format-hex to be redirected (ie, saved) into a file named (in our case) «file.txt». You can of course name the file anything you want. Both «file.exe» and «file.txt» are just examples.

Then open «file.txt» (or whatever you called it) in Notepad or another plain text editor. This allows you to page up and down through the output as much as you like.

Method 2 (Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10): Using Certutil

Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 (I don’t know about earlier versions) come with a versatile command line program called certutil which can be used to create a text file containing hexadecimal code alongside their ASCII text equivalent, if any.

Such a text file can then be viewed in any plain text editor, including Notepad, which comes with Windows.

Click the Start menu and type «cmd». The words «Command Prompt» should appear at the top. Click it.

This opens a command prompt window. You should be able to see a blinking text cursor on a line that says something like » C:\Users\christopherheng> «. The exact words will be different on your computer, since you are unlikely to have the same Windows account name as me.

Go to the directory containing the file you want to view. You can change directories by typing «cd» followed by the full directory name. For example, if you want to view a file in the «c:\Program Files\Windows Mail» directory, type

If you want to return to the default directory you were in when you first opened Command Prompt, type:

In all cases, after typing the command, you will have to hit the ENTER key before Command Prompt will run the program.

To view the contents of (say) «file.exe», we will first get certutil to generate a temporary text file called «file.txt». Actually, you can name the temporary text file anything you want. Just don’t give it the same name as an existing file, or certutil will blithely overwrite that file with its output.

The command to do this is:

As usual, tap the ENTER key after typing the above line, or nothing will happen. If any of your filenames contain spaces, encose them in quotation marks, like this:

The program «certutil» will then proceed to create the output file. When it’s done, you will be deposited back at the command line. Now open that file in Notepad or another plain text editor.

You can do this either by starting notepad the usual way (eg, typing «Notepad» into the Start menu and clicking the «Notepad» line that appears), then navigating to the location of «file.txt» and opening it, or you can also do it from the command line with:

Since you are viewing it in a text editor, you can scroll up and down the file the normal way you are used to, either with the PgUp and PgDn keys, the scroll bar, or the scroll wheel on your mouse. Note that this is a temporary file that you are viewing, so there’s no point trying to edit it or change it. You’re going to delete it once you are done viewing it (in the next step).

When you are done, delete the temporary file if you don’t want it any more. You can do this in the usual way with Explorer, or even from the command line by typing » del file.txt «.

Close the Command Prompt window by clicking the «x» in the top right hand corner, or by typing «exit» (followed by the ENTER key) on the command line.

Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved. Get more «How To» guides and tutorials from https://www.howtohaven.com/.

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How to view a binary file?

From what I understand, a compiler makes a binary file that consists of 1’s and 0’s that a CPU can read. I have a binary file but how do I open it to see the 1’s and 0’s that are there? A text editor says it can’t open it.

P.S. I have an assembly compiled binary that should be plain binary code of 1’s and 0’s?

11 Answers 11

unless you want to edit it of course. Most Linux distros have hexdump by default (but obviously not all).

Update

xxd does both binary and hexadecimal

Various people have answered some aspects of the query, but not all.

All files on computers are stored as 1’s and 0’s. Images, text files, music, executable applications, object files, etc.

They are all 0’s and 1’s. The only difference is that they are interpreted differently depending upon what opens them.

When you view a file using an image viewer, it takes all the 1’s and 0’s and turns them into an image, depending on the format of the file and some logic to work it all out.

Compiled binary files are no different, they are stored as 1’s and 0’s.

arzyfex’s answer gives you the tools to view those files in different ways, but reading a file as binary works for any file on a computer, as does viewing it as octal, or hex, or indeed ASCII, it just might not make sense in each of those formats.

If you want to understand what an executable binary file does, you need to view it in a way which shows you the assembler language (as a start), which you can do using,

which is a disassembler, it takes the binary content and converts it back into assembler (which is a very low level programming language). objdump is not always installed by default, so may need to be installed depending on your Linux environment.

Some external reading.

NB: as @Wildcard points out, it’s important to note the files don’t contain the characters 1 and 0 (as you see them on the screen), they contain actual numeric data, individual bits of information which are either on (1) or off (0). Even that description is only an approximation of the truth. They key point is that if you do find a viewer which shows you the 1’s and 0’s, even that is still interpreting the data from the file and then showing you the ASCII characters for 0 and 1. The data is stored in a binary format (see the Binary number link above). Pierre-Olivier’s community wiki entry covers this in more detail.

C File I/O and Binary File I/O

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do file IO, text and binary, in C, using fopen, fwrite, and fread, fprintf, fscanf, fgetc and fputc.

For C File I/O you need to use a FILE pointer, which will let the program keep track of the file being accessed. (You can think of it as the memory address of the file or the location of the file).

fopen

fopen modes

The allowed modes for fopen are as follows: Note that it’s possible for fopen to fail even if your program is perfectly correct: you might try to open a file specified by the user, and that file might not exist (or it might be write-protected). In those cases, fopen will return 0, the NULL pointer.

fclose

When you’re done working with a file, you should close it using the function
fclose returns zero if the file is closed successfully.

An example of fclose is

Reading and writing with fprintf, fscanf fputc, and fgetc

To work with text input and output, you use fprintf and fscanf, both of which are similar to their friends printf and scanf except that you must pass the FILE pointer as first argument. For example:
It is also possible to read (or write) a single character at a time—this can be useful if you wish to perform character-by-character input (for instance, if you need to keep track of every piece of punctuation in a file it would make more sense to read in a single character than to read in a string at a time.) The fgetc function, which takes a file pointer, and returns an int, will let you read a single character from a file: Notice that fgetc returns an int. What this actually means is that when it reads a normal character in the file, it will return a value suitable for storing in an unsigned char (basically, a number in the range 0 to 255). On the other hand, when you’re at the very end of the file, you can’t get a character value—in this case, fgetc will return «EOF», which is a constant that indicates that you’ve reached the end of the file. To see a full example using fgetc in practice, take a look at the example here.

The fputc function allows you to write a character at a time—you might find this useful if you wanted to copy a file character by character. It looks like this: Note that the first argument should be in the range of an unsigned char so that it is a valid character. The second argument is the file to write to. On success, fputc will return the value c, and on failure, it will return EOF.

For binary File I/O you use fread and fwrite.

Let’s look at one function to see how the notation works.

fread takes four arguments. Don’t be confused by the declaration of a void *ptr; void means that it is a pointer that can be used for any type variable. The first argument is the name of the array or the address of the structure you want to write to the file. The second argument is the size of each element of the array; it is in bytes. For example, if you have an array of characters, you would want to read it in one byte chunks, so size_of_elements is one. You can use the sizeof operator to get the size of the various datatypes; for example, if you have a variable int x; you can get the size of x with sizeof(x);. This usage works even for structs or arrays. E.g., if you have a variable of a struct type with the name a_struct, you can use sizeof(a_struct) to find out how much memory it is taking up.

The third argument is simply how many elements you want to read or write; for example, if you pass a 100 element array, you want to read no more than 100 elements, so you pass in 100.

The final argument is simply the file pointer we’ve been using. When fread is used, after being passed an array, fread will read from the file until it has filled the array, and it will return the number of elements actually read. If the file, for example, is only 30 bytes, but you try to read 100 bytes, it will return that it read 30 bytes. To check to ensure the end of file was reached, use the feof function, which accepts a FILE pointer and returns true if the end of the file has been reached.

fwrite is similar in usage, except instead of reading into the memory you write from memory into a file.

How to view files in binary from bash?

I would like to view the contents of a file in the current directory, but in binary from the command line. How can I achieve this?

13 Answers 13

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xxd does both binary and hexadecimal.

unless you want to edit it of course. Most linux distros have hexdump by default (but obviously not all).

sudo apt-get install bless

Bless is GUI tool which can view, edit, seach and a lot more. Its very light weight.

If you want to open binary files (in CentOS 7):

Hexyl formats nicely: sudo apt install hexyl

To get the output all in a single line in Hexadecimal:

to convert a file to its binary codes(hexadecimal representation) we say:

for example if we want to see all the convert all the contents of a binary file(executable, shared libraries, object files) we say:

but readelf is the best utility for analyzing elf(executable and linking format) files. so if we say:

all the contents in the binary file bash would be shown to us, also we could provide different flags for readelf to see all the sections and headers of an elf file separately, for example if we want to see only the elf header we say: