readme for github.

readme.markdown

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+## Partly
+
+This is a haskell library and command-line tool for inspecting,
+creating, and manipulating master boot records from disk images and (at
+your own risk!) block devices.
+
+`fdisk` has a few limitations, in my humble opinion -- it's written
+to be used interactively, doesn't display things in machine-readable
+format, and seems to be mostly centered around block devices.
+
+`partly`, on the other hand, explicitly favors disk images and never
+alters the file whose MBR you want to read.
+
+## Usage
+
+`partly view` is for inspecting and dumping the contents of an MBR.
+
+* `partly json` gives you a number of ways to dump the boot record as JSON.
+* `partly signature` simply prints the 16-bit boot signature as four
+  hexadecimal digits.
+* `partly bootloader` dumps the bootloader section (the first 446 bytes
+  of the MBR) to a file or to stdout.
+* `partly view partitions` pretty-prints the partition table, à la
+  `fdisk`.
+
+`partly make` is for creating MBRs, based on existing ones or not. You
+can see the specific flags and arguments with `partly make --help`.
+
+### But I really want to change the MBR of an image!
+
+Godspeed and good luck.
+
+````sh
+partly make --from disk.img --some-options -o mbr.bin
+dd if=mbr.bin of=disk.img bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc
+````
+
+## Todo
+
+* map partition type codes to readable strings -- this is an expansive
+  and inexact art. See [this page][partition-types].
+* `partly view partition 1`, that dumps the contents of
+  that partition from a disk image.
+* `partly make --first-partition fs.img` to automagically tailor an
+  MBR for a filesystem image.
+* Support for GUID partition tables.
+* Add support for viewing the DOS-style timestamp and disk signatures
+  in the command-line tool.
+
+[partition-types]: http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html