How to convert hex to ASCII characters in the Linux shell?

by

I used to do this with 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.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I prompt for Yes/No/Cancel input in a Linux shell script?
  2. The ‘eval’ command in Bash and its typical uses
  3. How do I know the script file name in a Bash script?
  4. Raise error in a Bash script
  5. Find multiple files and rename them in Linux
  6. Bash Script – iterating over output of find
  7. How do I remove newlines from a text file?
  8. Counter increment in Bash loop not working
  9. create a file with prefix =file1 followed by the random number
  10. Why to code a script which will check if some package is installed in linux and if not then install it?
  11. Aborting a shell script if any command returns a non-zero value
  12. Shell script: Run function from script over ssh
  13. How can I quickly sum all numbers in a file?
  14. Bash script process substitution Syntax error: “(” unexpected
  15. What is the difference between using `sh` and `source`?
  16. Setting environment variables in Linux using Bash
  17. Given two directory trees, how can I find out which files differ by content? [closed]
  18. Run a shell command when a file is added
  19. Add a bash script to path
  20. how to get MouseMove and MouseClick in bash?
  21. extracting unique values between 2 sets/files
  22. Bash script execution with and without shebang in Linux and BSD
  23. bash command not found when setting a variable
  24. How do you normalize a file path in Bash?
  25. How to run a script at a certain time on Linux? [closed]
  26. How do I get cURL to not show the progress bar?
  27. How to copy a file to multiple directories using the gnu cp command
  28. What is the Linux equivalent to DOS pause?
  29. How to check if sed has changed a file
  30. How to pass parameters to a Bash script?

Leave a Comment