binutil

Helpers for converting to and from binary and string representations of data

Installation

The simplest way to install the binutil command is to use Homebrew on Mac OS X:

$ brew install rotationalio/tools/binutil

If you have Go v1.19 or later, you can install it directly to your $GOBIN as follows:

$ go install github.com/bbengfort/binutil/cmd/binutil@latest

Finally, you can manually download the appropriate binary from the releases page and extract to a directory in your $PATH such as ~/bin.

Once installed, make sure you can execute the binutil command as follows:

$ binutil --version

Usage

You can use binutil to encode and decode binary strings from the command line. Basic usage is as follows:

$ binutil -d [DECODER] -e [ENCODER] [ENCODED BINARY DATA]

For example, to convert base64 encoded data to hex encoded data:

$ binutil -d base64 -e hex nYOG+hjpWFAGJsaBoLrSeg==
9d8386fa18e958500626c681a0bad27a

To see a list of availabled decoders, use the binutil decoders command:

$ binutil decoders
Registered Decoders:
====================
- ascii
- base64
- base64-raw
- base64-rawurl
- base64-std
- base64-url
- hex
- latin1
- text
- ulid
- utf-8
- uuid

Note: the above list may vary with new releases of binutil!

Generating Random Data

You can also quickly generate random data with the binutil rand command:

$ binutil rand -s 42 -e base64
cdMvYhnbiMymr0zTFWpOcEnnhSQhFe4a+FvJu0p3aBYuAiVvqr8crwx7

The -s specifies the size of the generated data by number of bytes.

This is useful for generating data for tests quickly.

Generating ULID and UUIDs

One important use case for binutil is to manage ULID and UUID in different binary formats (e.g. to insert data into a database via a SQL command). You can generate ULIDs and UUIDs as follows:

$ binutil ulid
       ULID        01H3W76DQS0X8PX8ZT62MYAMD1
       Time     2023-06-26T11:04:40.313-05:00
  Hex Bytes  0188f87336f907516ea3fa30a9e551a1
  b64 Bytes          AYj4czb5B1Fuo/owqeVRoQ==

The output shows a variety of formats and the timestamp for ULIDs, allowing easy generation of conflict-free IDs for tests and fixtures. To easily copy and paste a UUID:

$ binutil uuid -e uuid -n | pbcopy