Od is a Unix command-line tool used to show the raw bytes of a file in various ways including hexadecimal and octal, available on many platforms.

Options

Command-line options aka switches of od:

• -b: Show bytes in octal.
• -c: Show the ASCII characters of bytes.
• -d: Show words in decimal.
• -o: Show words in octal.
• -x: Show words in hex.

Command-line options aka switches of GNU od, beyond the bare-bones od:

• -t: Display the bytes as per format string.
• And more.

Links:

• GNU Coreutils, od invocation at gnu.org

Examples

Examples of od use:

• od -x myfile
  • Outputs hex, interpreting per two bytes.
• od -tx1 myfile
  • In GNU od, outputs hex, interpreting per one byte. Depending on the endianness of the system, the sequence on the byte level need not be the same as with od -x.
• od -tx1z myfile
  • In GNU od, as above but outputting ASCII to the right per "z".
• od -txz myfile
  • In GNU od, as above, but interpreting per multiple bytes.
• od -tx8z myfile
  • In GNU od, as above but interpreting per 8 bytes.
• od -tx7z myfile
  • In GNU od, may return with an error, since 7 is not a byte count supported.
• od -tx16z myfile
  • In GNU od, may return with an error, since 16 is not a byte count supported.

Versions

A version of GNU od for MS Windows is available from GnuWin32 project, as well as from Cygwin.

External links

• GNU Coreutils, od invocation at gnu.org
• od(1) OS X Manual Page at developer.apple.com
• Unix od(1) manual page at man.cat-v.org
• W:Od (Unix)