The last one is a very rarely used command, xxd. To make this output more readable, use the '-c' option :ģ. However, the od command also has options(-x) to do the hex dump of a file and the output is in big endian format: Another command, od, is quite frequently used in Unix world for octal dump of a file. If we see above, hex of 'w' is 77, 'e' is 65 and so on.Ģ. hexdump has an '-C' option which will map the ascii to hex and also displays in little endian format:Ġ0000000 77 65 6c 63 6f 6d 65 0a |welcome.| However, this output is not easier to interpret in case of a file with lot of contents since it becomes harder to match the ascii with hex. The above output shows the hex contents of the ascii file content 'welcome'.
One of the functions of this hexdump command, as the name suggests, is to dump the hex contents of the file: Many unix flavors has a command called, hexdump. Let us contain a sample file, say file1, with the following content:ġ. Let us see in this article the different ways to do it: At times, when you are doing any conversion of ascii to hex or to octal, we would like to view the hex contents or the hex dump of the file, be it ascii or binary.
