Linux – What Does an Asterisk ‘*’ Mean in Hexdump Output?

ddhexdumplinux

I print MBR with hexdump and I get the following output:

000001a0  67 60 6f 70 65 72 61 74  69 6e 67 60 73 79 73 74  |g`operating`syst|
000001b0  65 6d 00 40 00 63 7b da  c5 f5 61 68 00 40 00 40  |em.@.c{...ah.@.@|
000001c0  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  |.@.@.@.@.@.@.@.@|
*
000001f0  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  00 40 00 40 00 40 55 ea  |.@.@.@.@.@.@.@U.|
00000200

What does the astersik * mean in the output?

Best Answer

A line in the hexdump output consisting just a * means same as the line above. This is mentioned in the hexdump's manpage at the -v option (easy to be overlooked).

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Linux – How to do a hexdump of first track of HDD

bs is the block size, in bytes, and count is the number of those blocks to grab. So the command you actually want to dump the first track is:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63 | hexdump -C

The dd man page might be of help.

Linux – hexdump vs xxd format difference

There's no one command that I know of that will do the conversion, but it can easily be broken up into a few steps:

Strip addresses from hexdump output using sed
Convert into binary using xxd
Endian conversion (for example, 5a42 becomes 425a) using dd

Here's the full command:

sed 's/^[0-9]*//' hexdump | xxd -r -p | dd conv=swab of=binaryfile

Best Answer

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Linux – How to do a hexdump of first track of HDD

Linux – hexdump vs xxd format difference

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