fq

Tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.

In most cases fq works the same way as jq but instead of reading JSON it reads binary data. The result is a JSON compatible structure where values have a bit range, can have symbolic values and know how to be presented in a useful ways.

It was initially developed to debug, inspect and query media files but has since been extended to handle a variety of binary formats.

You can pronounce the name as you wish, I pronounce jq /‘dʒei’kju:/ so I usually pronounce fq /‘ef’kju:/.

NOTE: fq is still early in development so some things are broken or do not make sense. That also means that there is a great opportunity to help out!

Goals

• Make binary formats accessible and queryable.
• Nested formats and bit-oriented decoding.
• Quick and comfortable CLI tool.
• Bits and bytes transformations.

Hopes

• Make it useful enough that people want to help improve it.
• Inspire people to create similar tools.

Usage

Basic usage is fq . file.

For more details see usage.md

Install

Download release for your platform, unarchive it and move the executable to PATH etc.

Homebrew

# install latest release
brew install wader/tap/fq

Arch Linux

fq can be installed from the community repository using pacman:

pacman -S fq

You can also build and install the development (VCS) package using an AUR helper:

paru -S fq-git

Nix

nix-shell -p fq

FreeBSD

Use the fq port.

Alpine

Currently in edge testing but should work fine in stable also.

apk add -X http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing fq

Build from source

Make sure you have go 1.17 or later installed.

To install directly from git repository do:

# build and install latest release
go install github.com/wader/fq@latest

# or build and install latest master
go install github.com/wader/fq@master

# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp "$(go env GOPATH)/bin/fq" /usr/local/bin

To build and run tests from source directory:

make test fq
# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp fq /usr/local/bin
# it's also possible to use go run
go run fq.go

Supported formats

aac_frame, adts, adts_frame, apev2, ar, av1_ccr, av1_frame, av1_obu, avc_annexb, avc_au, avc_dcr, avc_nalu, avc_pps, avc_sei, avc_sps, bencode, bsd_loopback_frame, bson, bzip2, cbor, dns, dns_tcp, elf, ether8023_frame, exif, flac, flac_frame, flac_metadatablock, flac_metadatablocks, flac_picture, flac_streaminfo, gif, gzip, hevc_annexb, hevc_au, hevc_dcr, hevc_nalu, icc_profile, icmp, id3v1, id3v11, id3v2, ipv4_packet, jpeg, json, matroska, mp3, mp3_frame, mp4, mpeg_asc, mpeg_es, mpeg_pes, mpeg_pes_packet, mpeg_spu, mpeg_ts, msgpack, ogg, ogg_page, opus_packet, pcap, pcapng, png, protobuf, protobuf_widevine, pssh_playready, raw, sll2_packet, sll_packet, tar, tcp_segment, tiff, udp_datagram, vorbis_comment, vorbis_packet, vp8_frame, vp9_cfm, vp9_frame, vpx_ccr, wav, webp, xing, zip

For details see formats.md

TODO and ideas

See TODO.md

Development

See dev.md

Thanks and related projects

This project would not have been possible without itchyny's jq implementation gojq. I also want to thank HexFiend for inspiration and ideas and stedolan for inventing the jq language.

Similar or related projects

• HexFiend
• binspector
• kaitai
• Wireshark (specially tshark -T json)
• MediaInfo (specially mediainfo --Output=JSON and mediainfo --Details=1)
• GNU poke
• ffmpeg/ffprobe
• hexdump