= hexd =

Yes, it's yet another hex dumper.  This one produces a nice CP/M-like
format by default and can do EBCDIC.  It's internationalized, too.
Has many useful formatting functions.

The output format is similar to what "od -A x -t x1z -v" would
generate, but with a gutter between bytes 8 and 9 and without the
delimiting >< around the ASCII display.

Several release of this traveled under the name "hexdump". I changed
the name to avoid confusion with BSD hexdump, which I somehow only
became aware of sometime after the year 2000.  I'd retire this code
entirely, except that BSD hexdump doesn't do EBCDIC and its -s option
is not quite as flexible.

This hex dumper was born because

a) od octal format is appallingly ugly

b) od -x ain't much better

c) I needed to dump EBCDIC files from SNA sessions

d) I needed to dump single blocks of data offset into the file.

If any of these describes your universe, you'll like it too. The format
resembles a CP/M or MS/DOS DEBUG dump screen. There is nothing UNIX-specific
in the source, it should work OK under any C with a stdio.h library. And,
in fact, I'm told it has been used under Windows NT.

To test the program, "make check".  This checks to make sure dumping of
the PNG logo included with the distribution is stable.

I wrote the original of this in 1983.  I'm not certain, but I think it
may have been my very first C program, and I believe it was the first
code I wrote under Unix (4.1BSD on a Vax).  It's certainly the oldest
piece of C code I wrote that I still have source for.  It has held
up remarkably well.  For many years it was just `hex'.

This distribution now offers packagers a choice: by setting a variable
in the makefile, you can choose to build hexd either from the original
C or from a Rust translation of it. The tradeoff is:

1. Choose Rust and get Rust's memory-safety guarantees, but from a
   327K binary, or
2. Choose C and get a binary 20 times smaller.

You can find updates and other resources at:

	 http://www.catb.org/~esr

Send comments and bug reports to: Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>

This code is commonly packaged as "hex", "hexdump", or "hexdumpu".

image:https://repology.org/badge/vertical-allrepos/hexd-esr.svg[Repology
package status]
