What is r2garlic?

r2garlic is a radare2 plugin that adds DEX and Dalvik decompiling to the popular reverse engineering framework radare2. It wraps a separate project called Garlic, described as a very fast decompiler for Android's DEX bytecode format, and exposes its output directly inside radare2's command line interface. DEX is the compiled bytecode format used by Android apps, so this plugin is aimed at people who reverse engineer or analyze Android applications. The README describes the plugin mainly through the commands it adds once installed. You can decompile a single method at the current position with pd:G, decompile an entire class with pd:Gc, decompile every class in the loaded DEX file at once with pd:Ga, print general information about the DEX file similar to the dexdump tool with pd:Gi, or output smali, the human-readable assembly-like representation of DEX bytecode, for the current class with pd:Gs. A help command, pd:G?, lists these options from within radare2 itself. Installing r2garlic is straightforward for anyone already using radare2. The recommended route is through r2pm, radare2's own package manager, with a single install command. Alternatively, the README shows how to build it from source: clone the repository, initialize and update its git submodules, since it depends on the separate Garlic decompiler project, and run make. There is also a documented uninstall path for both the package manager and source-build routes. This is a small, focused tool written in C, meant to be used inside an existing radare2 setup rather than as a standalone application. It suits developers and security researchers who already analyze Android apps or DEX files and want fast decompiled output without leaving radare2.