Ascii/Hex convert in bash

Question

I\'m now doing it this way:

[root@~]# echo Aa|hexdump -v
0000000 6141 000a                              
0000003
[root@~]# echo -e \"\\x41\\x41\\x41\\x41\"
A         


        

Answer 1

The reason is because hexdump by default prints out 16-bit integers, not bytes. If your system has them, hd (or hexdump -C) or xxd will provide less surprising outputs - if not, od -t x1 is a POSIX-standard way to get byte-by-byte hex output. You can use od -t x1c to show both the byte hex values and the corresponding letters.

If you have xxd (which ships with vim), you can use xxd -r to convert back from hex (from the same format xxd produces). If you just have plain hex (just the '4161', which is produced by xxd -p) you can use xxd -r -p to convert back.