We suspected we’d ended up with some rogue characters in a file that we weren’t able to detect in our normal text editor recently and wanted to view the byte by byte representation of the file to check it out.

We came across http://live.gnome.org/Ghex which seems to be a pretty decent tool for allowing us to do this.

http://axel.alioth.debian.org/ is a download accelerator and lets us send multiple partial/range requests to download parts of a file before putting it back together at the end.

We found this quite useful when I was working in India to download files from the US over VPN. scp was painfully slow so we used to set up a simple HTTP server on the US server and then use axel to grab the file.

Some servers don’t support range requests but a reasonable number of them seem to.

The man page claims the following:

It worked reasonably well for replacing the following grep command:

One of the cool things is that by default it doesn’t search in binary files whereas grep does. I have noticed that it sometimes doesn’t pick up search terms in files which grep would match and I’m not entirely sure why.

I’m sure there are plenty of other cool tools about so if you know of any let me know!