What is a ‘hexadecimal dump’?
A hexadecimal dump, often called a hex dump, is a representation of binary data in a human-readable format using hexadecimal notation. Each byte of binary data is displayed as a pair of hexadecimal digits, making it easier to understand the data.
Here’s an example of the phrase “How are you” in a hexadecimal dump:
486f 7720 6172 6520 796f 750a How are you.
Here, “48” represents ‘H,’ “6f” represents ‘o,’ and so on.
xxd Command in Linux
xxd is a command-line tool that is primarily used for creating and analyzing hexadecimal dumps from files. It can also be used to reverse the process and convert a hexadecimal dump back into binary form. In this article, let’s uncover the practical applications of the “xxd” command in the Linux ecosystem.
xxd Command in Linux
- What is a ‘hexadecimal dump’?
- Installing xxd on Linux
- Using xxd command:
- Generating hexadecimal dumps
- Converting hexadecimal dump to the original file
- Formatting output of xxd
- Different dump output styles
- Embedding Binary Data in C/C++ Code (xxd -i)