od

od [OPTION]... [--] [FILENAME]...
od [-abcdDefFhHiIlLoOsxX] [FILENAME] [[+][0x]OFFSET[.][b]]
od --traditional [OPTION]... [FILENAME] [[+][0x]OFFSET[.][b] [[+][0x]LABEL[.][b]]]

Dump files in octal and other formats

Options

--help

Print help information.

--address-radix=<RADIX>, -A <RADIX>

Select the base in which file offsets are printed.

--skip-bytes=<BYTES>, -j <BYTES>

Skip bytes input bytes before formatting and writing.

--read-bytes=<BYTES>, -N <BYTES>

limit dump to BYTES input bytes

--endian=<big|little>

byte order to use for multi-byte formats

--strings=<BYTES>, -S <BYTES>

output strings of at least BYTES graphic chars. 3 is assumed when BYTES is not specified.

-a

named characters, ignoring high-order bit

-b

octal bytes

-c

ASCII characters or backslash escapes

-d

unsigned decimal 2-byte units

-D

unsigned decimal 4-byte units

-o

octal 2-byte units

-I

decimal 8-byte units

-L

decimal 8-byte units

-i

decimal 4-byte units

-l

decimal 8-byte units

-x

hexadecimal 2-byte units

-h

hexadecimal 2-byte units

-O

octal 4-byte units

-s

decimal 2-byte units

-X

hexadecimal 4-byte units

-H

hexadecimal 4-byte units

-e

floating point double precision (64-bit) units

-f

floating point single precision (32-bit) units

-F

floating point double precision (64-bit) units

--format=<TYPE>, -t <TYPE>

select output format or formats

--output-duplicates, -v

do not use * to mark line suppression

--width=<BYTES>, -w <BYTES>

output BYTES bytes per output line. 32 is implied when BYTES is not
specified.

--traditional

compatibility mode with one input, offset and label.

Displays data in various human-readable formats. If multiple formats are specified, the output will contain all formats in the order they appear on the command line. Each format will be printed on a new line. Only the line containing the first format will be prefixed with the offset.

If no filename is specified, or it is “-”, stdin will be used. After a “–”, no more options will be recognized. This allows for filenames starting with a “-”.

If a filename is a valid number which can be used as an offset in the second form, you can force it to be recognized as a filename if you include an option like “-j0”, which is only valid in the first form.

RADIX is one of o,d,x,n for octal, decimal, hexadecimal or none.

BYTES is decimal by default, octal if prefixed with a “0”, or hexadecimal if prefixed with “0x”. The suffixes b, KB, K, MB, M, GB, G, will multiply the number with 512, 1000, 1024, 1000^2, 1024^2, 1000^3, 1024^3, 1000^2, 1024^2.

OFFSET and LABEL are octal by default, hexadecimal if prefixed with “0x” or decimal if a “.” suffix is added. The “b” suffix will multiply with 512.

TYPE contains one or more format specifications consisting of: a for printable 7-bits ASCII c for utf-8 characters or octal for undefined characters d[SIZE] for signed decimal f[SIZE] for floating point o[SIZE] for octal u[SIZE] for unsigned decimal x[SIZE] for hexadecimal SIZE is the number of bytes which can be the number 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16, or C, S, I, L for 1, 2, 4, 8 bytes for integer types, or F, D, L for 4, 8, 16 bytes for floating point. Any type specification can have a “z” suffix, which will add a ASCII dump at the end of the line.

If an error occurred, a diagnostic message will be printed to stderr, and the exit code will be non-zero.

Examples

Display file using default settings: octal format, 8 bytes per line, byte offsets in octal, and duplicate lines replaced with *:

od {{path/to/file}}

Display file in verbose mode, i.e. without replacing duplicate lines with *:

od {{[-v|--output-duplicates]}} {{path/to/file}}

Display file in hexadecimal format (2-byte units), with byte offsets in decimal format:

od {{[-t|--format]}} {{x}} {{[-A|--address-radix]}} {{d}} {{[-v|--output-duplicates]}} {{path/to/file}}

Display file in hexadecimal format (1-byte units), and 4 bytes per line:

od {{[-t|--format]}} {{x1}} {{[-w|--width=]}}4 {{[-v|--output-duplicates]}} {{path/to/file}}

Display file in hexadecimal format along with its character representation, and do not print byte offsets:

od {{[-t|--format]}} {{xz}} {{[-A|--address-radix]}} {{n}} {{[-v|--output-duplicates]}} {{path/to/file}}

Read only 100 bytes of a file starting from the 500th byte:

od {{[-N|--read-bytes]}} 100 {{[-j|--skip-bytes]}} 500 {{[-v|--output-duplicates]}} {{path/to/file}}

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.