This program dumps a binary file to stdout in a form friendlier to the eyeball than either raw binary or the output of the Unix od(1) command. The default format is a CP/M style hexadecimal dump with byte offset in file, 16 bytes of hex and 16 bytes of alpha representation with '.' for non-printables per line. If no filename is given, hex reads from standard input.
The program accepts the following options to control its output:
set # of bytes dumped per line (default is 16)
display EBCDIC character assignments rather than ASCII
display printable characters as text in-line
don't output mid-page gutter
dump file section
print version number and exit
The command line is scanned left-to-right for filenames and options, and each file dumped according to the format defined by preceding options. To turn off an option, precede the letter with a +. Options that take arguments may have them immediately following the option letter or whitespace-separated.
If the command-line arguments include two or more filenames (with - being regarded as a `filename' for standard input), hexdump will emit a one-line header giving the name of the file in front of each input file.
The -s option expects a start offset,
optionally followed by a comma-separated count. Each of these should
be a decimal or hexadecimal integer (hexadecimal must be prefixed
by x or h; leading zeros will be ignored).
The -w option expects a width, formatted as a
single decimal or haxadecimal number in the style of an
-s option argument. Odd widths turn on the
-g option.
The definition of EBCDIC used is IBM's ASCII-compatible 96-character SCS set used with Systems Network Architecture (SNA).
Eric S. Raymond
<esr@thyrsus.com>. See my home page at http://www.catb.org/~esr
for updates and related resources.