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Is there any way to change the default line length for the od and hexdump commands? Can't see anything apropriate in the man pages.

newenglander
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3 Answers3

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I know this is an old question, but for completeness, here is an example hexdump command that prints 8 bytes per line:

hexdump -e '8/1 " %02X" "\n"' <file>

More information about hexdump format strings can be found at these links:

Community
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Matt
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od has the --width=N argument, which you can use to choose how many bytes per line, perhaps that's what you're looking for? hexdump has a -e FORMATSTRING which has promise, but I've never played too much with it.

jsbillings
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  • hey thanks for the tip about `width` in `od`, my man pages didn't have that! – newenglander May 04 '12 at 22:05
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    @newenglander as mentioned under SEE ALSO you should also check `info coreutils 'od invocation'`. – Thor May 04 '12 at 22:09
  • With anything GNU, it's always a good idea to check the info page. It has much more information. – jsbillings May 04 '12 at 22:09
  • Thanks for the extra tip, my SEE ALSO only had _hexdump(1), strings(1)_. – newenglander May 04 '12 at 22:15
  • Calling `info coreutils 'od invocation'` on my systems (Mac OS X, FreeBSD) gives me the message `No menu item 'coreutils' in node '(dir)Top'.` But I did try it on Linux and it was indeed more helpful (but then again so was the `man` page on that system). – newenglander May 06 '12 at 14:37
  • @newenglander: The `od` and `hexdump` on MacOSX isn't the GNU version, but BSD. They're different implementations than the GNU utilities, so no info pages. Good to hear that the `--width` argument works. – jsbillings May 06 '12 at 19:46
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I found the way to make -C | --canonical like but width-wide

hexdump -e '"%08_ax " '$(($(tput cols 2> /dev/null || echo $COLUMNS ) / 4 - 4 ))'/1 "%02x " " |" '$(($(tput cols 2> /dev/null || echo $COLUMNS ) / 4 - 4 ))'/1 "%_p" /0 "| \n"'

just change '$(($(tput cols 2> /dev/null || echo $COLUMNS ) / 4 - 4 ))' to your value

ArcherGodson
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