I need to edit and navigate through a rather large binary file (~8 GB) in Linux. I'd use Hiew if I was on Windows, are there any similar tools for Linux?

Preferably GNOME applications, but terminal ones will do as well.

7 Answers

I've been using Curses Hexedit, it doesn't seem to care of the filesizes and I have often edited even my harddisks directly with it.

1

wxHexEditor

There is no good hex/disk editor for linux. So I build one for myself... It's open source and can open files up to "exabyte".

3

Check the Linux column at this Comparison of hex editors.
And a Comparison of 5 Hex Editors for Ubuntu.
Refers LFHex,

lfhex can view files over 4gigs in size (if the OS supports large file offsets). Using a paged i/o abstraction file open times are invariant with file size, a 2gig file opens just as fast as a 2k file.

2

I have not tried an 8GB file, but vim has always worked for me :%!xxd converts to hex, :%!xxd -r converts back. I've also used okteta, but it's a KDE app. Check out this page.

1

there is bview that may do that

Art: lfview does have a search function, counter-intuitively called "Conversion Assistant" in the "View" menu. That function converts ascii to hex, for example, and searches for the result.

lfview can handle files larger than RAM, while bvi/bview is limited by available memory.

1

Just recently I published Hexinator, a free hex editor for Linux:

It supports many text encodings, shows variables of different sizes and much more.