wader/fq

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

10581 stars · 253 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

fq is a command-line tool, expression language, and set of decoders for inspecting and querying binary formats, modeled after jq and using the same expression syntax. It provides a structural hex viewer, nested format decoding, bit-level slicing, and an interactive REPL with auto-completion.

Use cases

• inspect and query binary file structures from the terminal
• decode mp4, flac, pcap, tls and other formats into queryable values
• hexdump a file with structural annotations
• extract fields from binary protocols like pcap or dns
• slice and concatenate raw bytes and bit-level data
• convert between serialization formats like xml, yaml, toml and json

When to choose

• you want jq-like querying over binary data instead of writing custom parsers
• you need to reverse-engineer or debug file formats and network captures
• you prefer a fast CLI with a REPL over GUI hex editors

When to avoid

• you need to edit or write binary formats rather than inspect them
• you need a format fq does not support and cannot extend
• you only work with plain text or JSON, where jq alone suffices

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

parser cli developer-tools serialization json developer-tools files parsers windows cli cross-platform binary-formats hex-viewer jq repl bit-level-decoding protocol-analysis media-formats command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="wader/fq")