Rax2

The rax2 utility comes with the radare framework and aims to be a minimalistic expression evaluator for the shell. It is useful for making base conversions between floating point values, hexadecimal representations, hexpair strings to ascii, octal to integer. It supports endianness conversion.

This is the help message of rax2, this tool can be used in the command-line or interactively (reading the values from stdin), so it can be used as a multi-base calculator.

Inside r2, the functionality of rax2 is available under the ? command. For example:

[0x00000000]> ? 3+4

As you can see, the numeric expressions can contain mathematical expressions like addition, subtraction, .. as well as group operations with parenthesis.

The syntax in which the numbers are represented define the base, for example:

3 : decimal, base 10
0xface : hexadecimal, base 16
0472 : octal, base 8
2M : units, 2 megabytes
...

This is the help message of rax2 -h, which will show you a bunch more syntaxes

$ rax2 -h
Usage: rax2 [options] [expr ...]
  =[base]                      ;  rax2 =10 0x46 -> output in base 10
  int     ->  hex              ;  rax2 10
  hex     ->  int              ;  rax2 0xa
  -int    ->  hex              ;  rax2 -77
  -hex    ->  int              ;  rax2 0xffffffb3
  int     ->  bin              ;  rax2 b30
  int     ->  ternary          ;  rax2 t42
  bin     ->  int              ;  rax2 1010d
  ternary ->  int              ;  rax2 1010dt
  float   ->  hex              ;  rax2 3.33f
  hex     ->  float            ;  rax2 Fx40551ed8
  oct     ->  hex              ;  rax2 35o
  hex     ->  oct              ;  rax2 Ox12 (O is a letter)
  bin     ->  hex              ;  rax2 1100011b
  hex     ->  bin              ;  rax2 Bx63
  ternary ->  hex              ;  rax2 212t
  hex     ->  ternary          ;  rax2 Tx23
  raw     ->  hex              ;  rax2 -S < /binfile
  hex     ->  raw              ;  rax2 -s 414141
  -l                           ;  append newline to output (for -E/-D/-r/..
  -a      show ascii table     ;  rax2 -a
  -b      bin -> str           ;  rax2 -b 01000101 01110110
  -B      str -> bin           ;  rax2 -B hello
  -d      force integer        ;  rax2 -d 3 -> 3 instead of 0x3
  -e      swap endianness      ;  rax2 -e 0x33
  -D      base64 decode        ;
  -E      base64 encode        ;
  -f      floating point       ;  rax2 -f 6.3+2.1
  -F      stdin slurp code hex ;  rax2 -F < shellcode.[c/py/js]
  -h      help                 ;  rax2 -h
  -i      dump as C byte array ;  rax2 -i < bytes
  -k      keep base            ;  rax2 -k 33+3 -> 36
  -K      randomart            ;  rax2 -K 0x34 1020304050
  -L      bin -> hex(bignum)   ;  rax2 -L 111111111 # 0x1ff
  -n      binary number        ;  rax2 -n 0x1234 # 34120000
  -N      binary number        ;  rax2 -N 0x1234 # \x34\x12\x00\x00
  -r      r2 style output      ;  rax2 -r 0x1234
  -s      hexstr -> raw        ;  rax2 -s 43 4a 50
  -S      raw -> hexstr        ;  rax2 -S < /bin/ls > ls.hex
  -t      tstamp -> str        ;  rax2 -t 1234567890
  -x      hash string          ;  rax2 -x linux osx
  -u      units                ;  rax2 -u 389289238 # 317.0M
  -w      signed word          ;  rax2 -w 16 0xffff
  -v      version              ;  rax2 -v

Some examples:

Calculator:

$ rax2 3+0x80
0x83
$ rax2 -d "1<<8"
256

Base conversion:

$ rax2 '=2' 73303325
100010111101000010100011101b

The single quote for '=2' is not mandatory for bash but is necessary for some shell like zsh.

Conversion in hex string

$ rax2 -s 4142
AB
$ rax2 -S AB
4142
$ rax2 -S < bin.foo
...

Endianness conversion:

$ rax2 -e 33
0x21000000
$ rax2 -e 0x21000000
33

Base64 decoding

$ rax2 -D ZQBlAA== | rax2 -S
65006500

Randomart:

$ rax2 -K 90203010
+--[0x10302090]---+
|Eo. .            |
| . . . .         |
|      o          |
|       .         |
|        S        |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
+-----------------+