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Article Index
1. Name
2. Synopsis
3. Frequently used options
4. Examples

1. Name

od [man page] - dump files in octal and other formats

2. Synopsis

od [OPTION]... [FILE]...
od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]
od --traditional [OPTION]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b] [+][LABEL][.][b]]

3. Frequently used options

-t, --format=TYPE
      select output format or formats
-a    same as -t a,  select named characters
-c    same as -t c,  select ASCII characters or backslash escapes
-x    same as -t x2, select hexadecimal 2-byte units
-l    same as -t dL, select decimal longs

4. Examples

Suppose that we have a file which contains:

$ echo -e "one\ntwo\nthree\nfour\nfive\n\nsix" > file

by default all output from od command comes as octal:

$ od file

Fist column is a octal offset of a file and the following output is a file content in octal representation.With -c option we can instruct od command to represent values in a file as ASCII.

$ od -a file

:[[Image:od02.gif]] To get understanding of what a offset is, we can use wc command to get total number of bytes in the file and that convert it with bc to octal number.

$ wc -c file
$ echo "obase=8; ibase=10; 29;" | bc