Bashscripts.org

I have been trying to decipher something for a while now, and it eludes me...maybe you can help?

Here is the line of code:


It is really just the "od" part, and the "-w99" that I cannot get. I believe it is formatting the ASCII string (that is what $1 contains) to an appropriate hex string, but I cannot verify.

The other question I have about this code is the "|" character...is this really doing a bitwise OR on the string, or is it a separator?

Any help would be appreciated!

JR

-w99 is an option of od to set the width of the output. In this case the output can span up to 99 characters before wrapping to a newline.

The pipe character is not a bitwise OR, but an I/O pipe between 2 shell commands. The first command, printf, outputs a string of text which then in *nix terms gets 'piped' as the input for the second command, od, which reads and converts this input. This way you can chain a lot of 'filter' commands one after the other. f.e. cat "file.txt" | grep "my string" | sed "s/my/your/" | sort

Thank you for that explanation patsie! It was very frustrating that I could not find specific information about that switch...

It occurred to me this morning that the "|" must be a separator within a printf statement, and that the function of the whole thing was to create a simple ASCII to hex conversion of the input. There must be a simpler way to do this, and knowing what is going on now is a step in the right direction.

Thanks again,
JR