.\"Made with Love
.TH hex2 1 "JULY 2019" Linux "User Manuals"
.SH NAME

hex2 - The trivially bootstrappable linker that is designed to be introspectable by humans

.SH SYNOPSIS
.na

hex2 --architecture ARCHITECTURE --base-address ADDRESS --file FILE [--output FILE [--non-executable]]

.SH DESCRIPTION

hex2 is designed to allow humans to write elf and other binary
files by hand in a format that allows comments and ease of understanding.
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At its core is read 2 hex characters add them together
and output a single byte. You can override this and use
binary or octal input if you so desire, using the --octal
or --binary option.
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If no output file is specified the output will be send to standard out.
By default the file will be executable unless the option:
--non-executable is also passed.
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The supported ARCHITECTURES are as follows: knight-native,
knight-posix, x86, amd64, armv7l and aarch64.
If you fail to specify an architecture, the default of knight-native
will be used.
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The base address for which the binary is to be loaded into memory
and thus the relative and absolute pointers should be based,
is passed via --base-address if it is not provided the default
value of ZERO will be assumed.
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hex2 also support labels in the :LABEL format and relative
and absolute pointers to those labels in 8, 16, 24 or 32bit sizes.
!LABEL, @LABEL, ~LABEL and %LABEL for 8, 16, 24 and 32bit relative addresses
respectively and $LABEL and &LABEL for 16 and 32bit absolute
addresses respectively.
Should you wish to specify the bit and byte encoding of the
addresses to match your target --big-endian and --little-endian

On architectures that require word alignment the < and ^
characters have a special meaning; particulary pad to word
and use word base address calculation rather than standard
byte based address calculation; generally seen in the form:
^~LABEL EB for calls in ARM

.SH EXAMPLES

Typically, hex2 will be called in scripts used in bootstrapping
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# hex2 -f ELF-armv7l.hex2 -f cc.hex2 --little-endian --architecture armv7l --base-address 0x10000 -o cc
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.SH COMPATIBILITY

hex2 is compatible with all Turing complete machines;
even the ones that try to be Turing complete -1

.SH AUTHORS
Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
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Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>

.SH COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2016-2019 Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
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Copyright 2017 Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
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License GPLv3+.

.SH "SEE ALSO"
M1(1), blood-elf(1), kaem(1), syscalls(2)
