The Official Radare2 Book

In 2006, Sergi Àlvarez (aka pancake) was working as a forensic analyst. Since he wasn't allowed to use the company software for his personal needs, he decided to write a small tool-a hexadecimal editor-with very basic characteristics:

   • be extremely portable (unix friendly, command line, c, small)

   • open disk devices, this is using 64bit offsets

   • search for a string or hexpair

   • review and dump the results to disk

The editor was originally designed to recover a deleted file from an HFS+ partition.

After that, pancake decided to extend the tool to have a pluggable io to be able to attach to processes and implemented the debugger functionalities, support for multiple architectures, and code analysis.