xxd

src: 6 More Unique Linux Utilities You Forgot About | by Tate Galbraith | Better Programming

The xxd utility is one of the multitude of ways to perform hexadecimal dumps on Linux. There are a ton of utilities that have similar functionality, but the xxd program is slightly different. The added advantage is that you can both dump and restore hex using this utility. There are also a lot of configurable flags and you can perform patches on binary files as well.

Let’s assume we wanted to take a hex dump of the following file named foo:

1234  
5678

All we have to do is provide the input and xxd will encode the file to stdout automatically (a handy feature to have by default for shorter input files):

xxd foo  
  
00000000: 3132 3334 0a35 3637 380a                 1234.5678.

You can also output directly to a dump file by passing an additional filename parameter:

xxd foo bar

This will send the hex dump to the file titled bar.

The man page for xxd is available here.