Convert binary data to hexadecimal in a shell script

Question

I want to convert binary data to hexadecimal, just that, no fancy formatting and all. hexdump seems too clever, and it \"overformats\" for me. I want to take x

Answer 1

If you need a large stream (no newlines) you can use tr and xxd (part of Vim) for byte-by-byte conversion.

head -c1024 /dev/urandom | xxd -p | tr -d $'\n'

Or you can use hexdump (POSIX) for word-by-word conversion.

head -c1024 /dev/urandom | hexdump '-e"%x"'

Note that the difference is endianness.