How to convert hex to ASCII characters in the Linux shell

Question

Lets say that I have a string 5a   This is the hex representation of the ASCII letter Z   I need to know a Linux shell command which will take a hex string and output the ASCII characters that the string represents   So if I do   echo 5a   command im looking for   I will see a solitary letter Z   Z

User · Answer

dc can convert between numeric bases     echo 5a    echo 16i  tr  a-z   A-Z   echo P    dc Z

User · Answer

You can make it through echo only and without the other stuff  Don t forget to add  -n  or you will get a linebreak automatically   echo -n -e   x5a

User · Answer

Here is a pure bash script  as printf is a bash builtin      warning   spaces do matter die    echo       gt  amp 2 exit 1    p 48656c6c6f0a  test       p   amp  1      0    die  length is odd  p2     for   i 0  i lt    p   i  2   do p2  p2  x  p  i 2  done printf   p2    If bash is already running  this should be faster than any other solution which is launching a new process

User · Answer

depending on where you got that  5a   you can just append  x to it and pass to printf     a 5a   a   x  a     printf   a  Z

User · Answer

I used to do this using xxd  echo -n 5a   xxd -r -p   But then I realised that in Debian Ubuntu  xxd is part of vim-common and hence might not be present in a minimal system  To also avoid perl  imho also not part of a minimal system  I ended up using sed  xargs and printf like this   echo -n 5a   sed  s    0-9A-F   2           x 1 gI    xargs printf   Mostly I only want to convert a few bytes and it s okay for such tasks  The advantage of this solution over the one of ghostdog74 is  that this can convert hex strings of arbitrary lengths automatically  xargs is used because printf doesnt read from standard input

User · Answer

Some python3 one-liners that work with any number of bytes   Decoding hex  with strip  so that it s ok to have a newline on stdin      echo 666f6f0a   python3 -c  import sys  binascii  sys stdout buffer write binascii unhexlify input   strip      foo   Encoding hex     echo foo   python3 -c  import sys  binascii  print binascii hexlify sys stdin buffer read    decode     666f6f0a

User · Answer

echo 5a   python -c  import sys  print chr int sys stdin read   base 16

User · Answer

As per  Randal comment  you can use perl  e g     printf 5a5a5a5a   perl -lne  print pack  H        ZZZZ   and other way round     printf ZZZZ   perl -lne  print unpack  H        5a5a5a5a     Another example with file     printf 5a5a5a5a   perl -lne  print pack  H         gt  file bin   perl -lne  print unpack  H         lt  file bin 5a5a5a5a

User · Answer

You can use this command  python script  for larger inputs  echo 58595a   python -c  quot import sys  import binascii  print binascii unhexlify sys stdin read   strip    decode    quot   The result will be  XYZ  And for more simplicity  define an alias  alias hexdecoder  python -c  quot import sys  import binascii  print binascii unhexlify sys stdin read   strip    decode    quot    echo 58595a   hexdecoder

User · Answer

There is a simple shell command  quot ascii quot   if you use Ubuntu just sudo apt install ascii  then  ascii 0x5a  will output  ASCII 5 10 is decimal 090  hex 5a  octal 132  bits 01011010  prints as  Z  Official name  Majuscule Z Other names  Capital Z  Uppercase Z

User · Answer

GNU awk 4 1  awk -niord   0 chr  0x RT   RS    ORS    Note that if you echo to this it will produce an extra null byte    echo 595a   awk -niord   0 chr  0x RT   RS    ORS    od -tx1c 0000000  59  5a  00           Y   Z   0   Instead use printf    printf 595a   awk -niord   0 chr  0x RT   RS    ORS    od -tx1c 0000000  59  5a           Y   Z   Also note that GNU awk produces UTF-8 by default    printf a1   awk -niord   0 chr  0x RT   RS    ORS    od -tx1 0000000 c2 a1   If you are dealing with characters outside of ASCII  and you are going to be Base64 encoding the resultant string  you can disable UTF-8 with -b  echo 5a   sha256sum   awk -bniord  RT   w   0 chr  0x RT   RS    ORS

User · Answer

Similar to my answer here  Linux shell scripting  hex number to binary string  You can do it with the same tool like this  using ascii printable character instead of 5a    echo -n 616263   cryptocli dd -decoders hex   Will produce the following result   abcd

User · Answer

echo -n 5a   perl -pe  s   0-9a-f  2   chr hex  1 gie    Note that this won t skip non-hex characters  If you want just the hex  no whitespace from the original string etc    echo 5a   perl -ne  s   0-9a-f  2   print chr hex  1 gie    Also  zsh and bash support this natively in echo   echo -e   x5a

User · Answer

Bash one-liner  echo -n  5a    while read -N2 code  do printf   x code   done

[linux] How to convert hex to ASCII characters in the Linux shell?

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