histofile

This program shows you a histogram of the used byte-values in the file. In other words: how many A, how many B, how many C and so on; and all this for the entire range from 0 to 255. Additionally it makes the assumption "this value is the line separator" and calculates the resulting length of lines. These are shown in the last two columns. This is some pre-work for upcoming features of this program.

Click in "open" to get a file-open-dialog to load a file to view. Then you can sort the list by clicking in the heading of each column.

In the graphical output you have 2 blue "helping-lines". One at 32 and the second at 128. And 3 green areas for the ASCII alphanumerics. White dots are ordered by the byte-values, the red ones are ordered in descending occurences. Below the graphic you see the output of `file`.

Click with shift in the list to set the upper limit of the graph, click with ctrl to set the lower limit. Stay in the list or the graph with the mouse for a second to get a short tool-tip help. The not visible values get 'squeezed' to the upper and lower edge in the graph. In the list they are shown grayed.

If you see for example a red almost flat line over the full range it is most likely a "packed" data format like jpeg or gz. If the red area stops at the beginning of the second green area (65), it might be a base64 encoding or similar. Have a look at simple wav-files for an interesting view. Here is a screenshot:

So, whats it good for? Besides being my personal GTK+ training area you can use it to see which control-codes are used in a text file, or which non-ASCII characters. With packed files you can get an idea of the quality of the compression. In the future it will detect file types automatically and can be an add-on to the well known tool "file", which is based on "magic cookies".

It uses GTK+ for GUI and is currently written in C. But that will change to C++ using Glade-- soon. The source tarball successfully built on

hardwareOSGUI
AlphaLinuxGnome
i386LinuxKDE and Gnome
i386freeBSDKDE
UltraSparcSolaris 8KDE

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known issues

Find and get more info and downloads from sourceforge. If you want to discuss the program or anything related to it use the tools offered by SourceForge. If you want to contact me personally use the link in the footer.

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Emil Obermayr