(Serial port or com port? - Serial ports are often refered as COM ports. It is the same to be short. You can read abut it in the Wiki article )
Consider this an informal guide to reading the Solana snapshot format. This guide is written for Solana Labs versions v1.14 through v1.17.
You are probably reading this because you want to read the accounts in a snapshot without going through the pain of interfacing with the Solana Labs codebase.
We assume general familiarity with the Solana ledger.