Radare2 has a very rich set of commands and configuration options to perform data and code analysis, to extract useful information from a binary, like pointers, string references, basic blocks, opcode data, jump targets, cross references and much more. These operations are handled by the a (analyze) command family:
|Usage: a[abdefFghoprxstc] [...]
| aa[?] analyze all (fcns + bbs) (aa0 to avoid sub renaming)
| a8 [hexpairs] analyze bytes
| ab[b] [addr] analyze block at given address
| abb [len] analyze N basic blocks in [len] (section.size by default)
| abt [addr] find paths in the bb function graph from current offset to given address
| ac [cycles] analyze which op could be executed in [cycles]
| ad[?] analyze data trampoline (wip)
| ad [from] [to] analyze data pointers to (from-to)
| ae[?] [expr] analyze opcode eval expression (see ao)
| af[?] analyze Functions
| aF same as above, but using anal.depth=1
| ag[?] [options] draw graphs in various formats
| ah[?] analysis hints (force opcode size, ...)
| ai [addr] address information (show perms, stack, heap, ...)
| an [name] [@addr] show/rename/create whatever flag/function is used at addr
| ao[?] [len] analyze Opcodes (or emulate it)
| aO[?] [len] Analyze N instructions in M bytes
| ap find prelude for current offset
| ar[?] like 'dr' but for the esil vm. (registers)
| as[?] [num] analyze syscall using dbg.reg
| av[?] [.] show vtables
| ax[?] manage refs/xrefs (see also afx?)
In fact, a namespace is one of the biggest in radare2 tool and allows to control very different parts of the analysis:
Code flow analysis
Data references analysis
Using loaded symbols
Managing different type of graphs, like CFG and call graph
