Read a file by bytes in BASH

Question

I need to read first byte of file I specified, then second byte,third and so on. How could I do it on BASH? P.S I need to get HEX of this bytes

Answer 1

Did you try xxd? It gives hex dump directly, as you want..

For your case, the command would be:

xxd -c 1 /path/to/input_file | while read offset hex char; do
  #Do something with $hex
done

Note: extract the char from hex, rather than while read line. This is required because read will not capture white space properly.