I\'m now doing it this way:
[root@~]# echo Aa|hexdump -v 0000000 6141 000a 0000003 [root@~]# echo -e \"\\x41\\x41\\x41\\x41\" A
here a little script I wrote to convert ascii to hex. hope it helps:
echo '0x'"`echo 'ASCII INPUT GOES HERE' | hexdump -vC | awk 'BEGIN {IFS="\t"} {$1=""; print }' | awk '{sub(/\|.*/,"")}1' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d ' '`" | rev | cut -c 3- | rev