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The Ultimate Linux Shell Scripting Guide
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The octal dump (od
) utility has a lot of options, and it would require quite a few pages to fully explore them. But, unless you’re a hard-core programmer, you’ll probably have need for only a very few of these options.
If you take a Linux certification exam, you may see a question or two about od
. However, you probably won’t see any questions that cover od
in any amount of depth. So for now, I’ll just cover the basics.
The name of this utility is a bit misleading. It does, by default, display file contents as octal byte-code. But, that’s not all that it does. By using the appropriate option switches, you can also use od
to display file contents in several other formats. od
is normally used to display the contents of binary files, but you can also use it to display non-printing characters in normal text files.
You can display the contents of an entire file, or limit the amount of the file contents that you want to display. If...