# BRUT : Binary Root UTilities

## ABOUT

BRUT is my own set of utilities to read [ROOT](http://root.cern.ch) files,
in an extremely lowlevel manner, without using ROOT.

My main purpose (besides understanding how ROOT internals work) is to
quickly compare two CMSSW files, without bothering about the ROOT
/ CMSSW specific metadata and without needing ROOT.

## BUILDING

In order to compile you need to have [cmake](cmake.org) installed.

Other dependencies required to build it are
[libxz](http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html), [zlib](http://www.zlib.net) and
[openssl](http://www.openssl.org) (on linux, on mac it uses CommonCrypto which
comes with Macosx).

Once you have everything in place you can do:

  cmake . && make

and use it directly from the bin/ directory.

## USAGE

`brut` only takes the ROOT file to open as a parameter:

	bin/brut /path/to/some/rootfile.root

This will present a prompt like the following:

	Welcome to Binary Root UTilities shell.
	Type "help" to list available commands.
	>

Notice you can simply pipe the commands via stdin.

### listkeys: dumping the list of all keys:

One can dump the list of all TKeys contained in a file with:

		listkeys

### dump: dumping a particular object at a given offset in the file

One can dump the full record of an object in the file via the dump,
command:

		dump <type> <offset>

where offset is the offset in the file and <type> for the moment can 
only be:

		dump <type> <offset>