History
The radare project [http://radare.org/] started in February of 2006 aiming to provide a free and simple command line interface for a hexadecimal editor supporting 64 bit offsets to make searches and recovering data from hard-disks.
Since then, the project has grown with the aim changed to provide a complete framework for analyzing binaries with some basic *NIX concepts in mind like 'everything is a file', 'small programs that interact together using stdin/out' or 'keep it simple'.
It's mostly a single-person project, but some contributions (in source, patches, ideas or species) have been made and are really appreciated.
The project is composed of a hexadecimal editor as the central point of the project with assembler/disassembler, code analysis, scripting features, analysis and graphs of code and data, easy unix integration, ...
Overview
Nowadays the project is composed of a set of small utilities that can be used together or independently from the command line:
radare2
The core of the hexadecimal editor and debugger. Allows to open any kind of file from different IO access like disk, network, kernel plugins, remote devices, debugged processes, ... and handle any of them as if they were a simple plain file.
Implements an advanced command line interface for moving around the file, analyzing data, disassembling, binary patching, data comparision, searching, replacing, scripting with Ruby, Python, Lua and Perl, ...
rabin2
Extracts information from executable binaries like ELF, PE, Java CLASS, MACH-O. It's used from the core to get exported symbols, imports, file information, xrefs, library dependencies, sections, ...
rasm2
Commandline assembler and disassembler for multiple architectures (intel[32,64], mips, arm, powerpc, java, msil, ...)
$ rasm2 -a java 'nop'
00
$ rasm2 -a x86 -d '90'
nop
$ rasm2 -a x86 -b 32 'mov eax, 33'
b821000000
$ echo 'push eax;nop;nop' | rasm2 -f -
5090
rahash2
Implementation of a block-based rahash for small text strings or large disks, supporting multiple algorithms like md4, md5, crc16, crc32, sha1, sha256, sha384, sha512, par, xor, xorpair, mod255, hamdist or entropy.
It can be used to check the integrity of or track changes between big files, memory dumps or disks.
radiff2
Binary diffing utility implementing multiple algorithms. Supports byte-level or delta diffing for binary files and code-analysis diffing to find changes in basic code blocks from radare code analysis or IDA ones using the idc2rdb rsc script.
rafind2
rafind2 is a program to find byte patterns in files
ragg2
Ragg2 is a frontend for r_egg. It's used to compile programs into tiny binaries for x86-32/64 and ARM.
rarun2
Rarun2 is used as a launcher for running programs with different environment, arguments, permissions, directories and overridden default file descriptors. It can be useful for :