Okay, so I gotta share what I was tinkering with lately. Got really fed up with dealing with these weird binary files, you know? The ones that are supposed to log events but are just a pain to actually look at.
Every time I needed to check something quick, it was this whole production. Fire up a heavy tool, wait for it to load, navigate through menus… forget it. I thought, there has to be a simpler way, right? Just something quick and dirty for the command line.
Getting Started on This Thing
So, I decided to just whip something up myself. Didn’t want anything fancy. Thought about using Bash at first, but dealing with binary data in Bash? Nah, that’s asking for a headache.
Ended up just going with Python. It’s usually my go-to for quick scripts like this. Already had it installed, didn’t need to set up a whole new environment or anything complicated. Just opened up my text editor and started hacking away.
Figuring Out the Guts
First thing was figuring out how to actually read these binary files properly. They weren’t exactly standard. Had to kinda guess the structure first. Lots of trial and error there.
- Tried reading byte by byte. Slow.
- Tried reading chunks. Better.
- Had to figure out where the actual event messages started and ended. That took some staring at hex dumps, lemme tell ya.
Spent a good afternoon just printing out weird characters and numbers until I started seeing patterns. It wasn’t elegant, just brute force, really. Get a chunk, check if it looks like a header, if yes, try to decode the payload. If not, keep looking.
The Annoying Part
The real kicker was handling corrupted entries. Sometimes the process writing these logs would just die mid-write. Left me with half-finished records in the binary file.
My first version of the script would just crash and burn when it hit one of these. Super annoying. Had to build in some checks. Basically, wrap the decoding part in a try-except block. If it failed to decode a record, just print a warning like “Skipped corrupted record” and move on. Not ideal, but good enough for a quick look-see tool.
Took me longer than I care to admit to get that right.
What It Does Now
So now, I have this little script. You just run it from the terminal, point it at one of those binary log files.
It spits out the event messages in plain text. Simple as that. No fancy GUI, no complex options. It just does the one thing I needed: quickly peek inside those annoying files without the drama.
It’s rough, probably breaks on edge cases I haven’t found yet, but it saves me time, and that’s what counts. Does the job I built it for.
Yeah, it’s not gonna win any awards, and I wouldn’t exactly package it up for others to use without a lot more work. But for my own workflow? It’s pretty wicked, gets the job done when I need it. Sometimes the simple, custom tools are the best.
