Bug 14551

Summary:	hexedit-applet desperately needs a "readonly"-option
Product:	Busybox	Reporter:	Guenther Brunthaler <gb_about_gnu>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	unassigned
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	busybox-cvs
Priority:	P5
Version:	1.33.x
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Host:		Target:
Build:

Description Guenther Brunthaler 2022-01-25 19:57:23 UTC

The "hexedit" BB applet is extremely useful for quickly examining boot sectors, partition tables and similar on-disk structures.

However, the current applet does not have a "readonly" option, and immediately writes any keyboard input to the disk.

This makes the usage of this applet extremely dangerous in practice: Accidentally pressing any key which corresponds to a hexadecimal character immediately damages the boot sector, superblock of a filesystem etc.

I therefore strongly recommend either adding a "-r" option to the applet for opening the target in read-only mode, or adding a second applet (like "hexbrowse") which shares the same code except for the mode argument to open().

Another option would be to cache the input in a buffer and only write it back after issuing a special local subcommand, such as pressing the F2 key in the original hexedit application.