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bitcoin-blocks

Script to parse Bitcoin block header data from blk*.dat files

Installing

You need a perl interpreter, and the packages Digest::SHA and Getopt::Std. Once these are installed you can simply run perl bitcoin-blocks ... or ./bitcoin-blocks ... if you set it executable.

Usage

./bitcoin-blocks [-i | -d | -t] [-s] block-files...

Process the given block-files (e.g. blk*.dat), which should be in the format used by Bitcoin Core, and produce output according to one of the following modes:

  • Index (-i): Output (to stdout) a comma-separated text file with one line per block, containing the information from its header. Suitable for further processing with a spreadsheet program or your own scripts. The first line can be used as column headings; filter the output through tail +2 if you don't want it.

  • Dump (-d): Output (to stdout) a new .dat file containing all the processed blocks in increasing order by height. Should be suitable for use as a bootstrap.dat file to be imported into another Bitcoin Core instance.

  • Test (-t): Only makes sense if given a single input file. Test if all the blocks are in increasing order by height. Mostly useful to run on the output of -d to check that it did the right thing. Exit code is 0 if they are in order, or 2 if not.

By default only the main chain (i.e. the longest chain, by number of blocks) is processed, and all blocks not in that chain are omitted. Use -s to include them as well. For -i and -d, the "side" blocks will come after the main chain, in random order. A future version may organize them in a more useful way.

Notes

The main chain is identified as the chain having the largest number of blocks, whereas according to the true Bitcoin protocol, it should be identified as the chain with the most proof-of-work. Normally they should be the same, unless someone is doing something weird.