Unix for Advanced Users

15. Advanced Commands and Usage

15.2. od

od stands for octal dump. It permits you to look at a file's raw data, byte by byte. By default, it prints out every byte in its octal representation. However, you can also specify a character, decimal, or hexidecimal representation.

od can be useful for detecting special characters in a file, or displaying binary files. Some of the more oft used flags for od are as follows:

-d prints decimal form of bytes values
-x prints hexadecimal form of bytes values
-c display character form of byte values (non printing characters will have a corresponding character representation. For example, the return key is displayed as \r and the tab is displayed as \t.)