Hex dump

In computing, a hex dump is a textual hexadecimal view (on screen or paper) of (often, but not necessarily binary) computer data, from memory or from a computer file or storage device. Looking at a hex dump of data is usually done in the context of either debugging, reverse engineering or digital forensics. Interactive editors that provide a similar view but also manipulating the data in question are called hex editors.

In a hex dump, each byte (8 bits) is represented as a two-digit hexadecimal number. Hex dumps are commonly organized into rows of 8 or 16 bytes, sometimes separated by whitespaces. Some hex dumps have the hexadecimal memory address at the beginning.

Some common names for this program function are,  ,  ,   and simply   or even.

Samples
A sample text file:

0123456789ABCDEF /* ********************************************** */	Table with TABs (09) 1      2       3	3.14	6.28	9.42

as displayed by Unix :

The leftmost column is the hexadecimal displacement (or address) for the values of the following columns. Each row displays 16 bytes, with the exception of the row containing a single *. The * is used to indicate multiple occurrences of the same display were omitted. The last line displays the number of bytes taken from the input.

An additional column shows the corresponding ASCII character translation with hexdump -C or hd:

This is helpful when trying to locate TAB characters in a file which is expected to use multiple spaces.

The -v option causes hexdump to display all data verbosely:

od
POSIX command can be used to display a hex dump with the -t x option.

Character evaluations can be added with the -c option: 0000000   0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   A   B   C   D   E   F           30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  41  42  43  44  45  46 0000020  \n   /   *       *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 0a 2f  2a  20  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a 0000040   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *           2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a  2a

0000100   *   *       *   /  \n  \t   T   a   b   l   e       w   i   t           2a  2a  20  2a  2f  0a  09  54  61  62  6c  65  20  77  69  74 0000120   h       T   A   B   s       (   0   9   )  \n  \t   1  \t  \t 68 20  54  41  42  73  20  28  30  39  29  0a  09  31  09  09 0000140   2  \t  \t   3  \n  \t   3. 1  4  \t   6. 2  8  \t 32 09  09  33  0a  09  33  2e  31  34  09  36  2e  32  38  09 0000160   9   .   4   2  \n 39 2e  34  32  0a 0000165 In this output the TAB characters are displayed as \t and NEWLINE characters as \n.

DUMP, DDT and DEBUG
In the CP/M 8-bit operating system used on early personal computers, the standard DUMP program would list a file 16 bytes per line with the hex offset at the start of the line and the ASCII equivalent of each byte at the end. Bytes outside the standard range of printable ASCII characters (20 to 7E) would be displayed as a single period for visual alignment. This same format was used to display memory when invoking the D command in the standard CP/M debugger DDT. Later incarnations of the format (e.g. in the DOS debugger DEBUG) changed the space between the 8th and 9th byte to a dash, without changing the overall width.

This notation has been retained in operating systems that were directly or indirectly derived from CP/M, including DR-DOS, MS-DOS/PC DOS, OS/2 and Windows. On Linux systems, the command hexcat produces this classic output format, too. The main reason for the design of this format is that it fits the maximum amount of data on a standard 80-character-wide screen or printer, while still being very easy to read and skim visually.

Here the leftmost column represents the address at which the bytes represented by the following columns are located. CP/M and various DOS systems ran in real mode on the x86 CPUs, where addresses are composed of two parts (base and offset).

In the above examples the final 00s are non-existent bytes beyond the end of the file. Some dump tools display other characters so that it is clear they are beyond the end of the file, typically using spaces or asterisks, e.g.:

or