Install gsar with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• gsar

Project history

The official source archive identifies the program as gsar 1.51 and credits Tormod Tjaberg and Hans Peter Verne for 1992-2020 copyright. The change log starts with early 1992 implementation work, followed by a sequence of DOS, Unix, compiler-portability, and buffer-handling releases.

The 1996 1.10 release was a major rewrite of the search and replace code, with easier Unix compilation, generated Boyer-Moore-Gosper tables at runtime, and safer handling of directories and buffers. Later releases were quieter maintenance updates, including MinGW support in 2002, larger search buffers and documentation cleanup in 2008, new text modifiers in 2019, and explicit 64-bit file offsets in 2020.

Adoption history

The official homepage says the archive includes full source and DOS/Win32 executables, while most programs compile under Unix as well. Homebrew packages gsar as a small Unix-style command-line utility, which reflects its continued use as a portable binary search-and-replace tool rather than a large active ecosystem.

The homepage notes that gsar was selected as PriceLessWare 2006, indicating some Windows freeware-era recognition before its later package-manager life on Unix-like systems.

How it is used

gsar searches one or more input files, optionally replaces matches, can overwrite multiple files, and can operate as a stdin/stdout filter. The manual emphasizes binary-safe strings, byte offsets, hex entry, DOS-to-Unix and Unix-to-DOS conversion helpers, and context display.

Typical package-manager usage is for scripts or one-off maintenance where byte-oriented search and replace is needed without regular expressions, especially across binary files or files containing control characters.

Why package nerds care

gsar is package-nerd interesting because it is a compact old utility that still fills a sharp niche: binary-safe search and replacement with source available, no runtime dependency stack, and behavior stable enough for packaging.

Its long change log is a small history of portability work across DOS, Windows, Unix, MinGW, compiler quirks, large-file offsets, and command-line parsing, which is exactly the sort of maintenance package managers preserve for users who need the old tool to keep working.

Timeline

• 1992: Official change log records main program and parser work.
• 1993: Version 1.05 implements filter mode and faster disk I/O.
• 1996: Version 1.10 rewrites search and replace code and improves Unix compilation.
• 2002: Version 1.11 adds MinGW support and ships a Win32 executable.
• 2008: Version 1.21 expands search and replace buffers and refreshes documentation.
• 2019: Version 1.50 adds wide-character and hexadecimal text modifiers.
• 2020: Version 1.51 adds explicit 64-bit file offsets.

Related projects

• gsar sits near grep, sed, tr, binary patching tools, and small DOS/Unix text-processing utilities, but its official documentation emphasizes binary search and replace rather than line-oriented regular-expression processing.

Sources

• https://tjaberg.com/
• https://tjaberg.com/gsar151.zip
• source_facts.description
• source_facts.package-manager