Shell: How to read the bytes of a binary file and print as hexadecimal

It's fairly straightforward to do the conversion from binary in pure bash (echo and printf are builtins):

Binary to decimal

$ echo "$((2#101010101))"
341

Binary to hexadecimal

$ printf '%x\n' "$((2#101010101))"
155

Going back to binary using bash alone is somewhat more complex, so I suggest you see the other answers for solutions to that.

Testing with this file:

$ echo hello world > test.txt
$ echo -n $'\x1b\x1f' >> test.txt
$ echo whatever >> test.txt
$ hexdump -C test.txt 
00000000  68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f  72 6c 64 0a 1b 1f 77 68  |hello world...wh|
00000010  61 74 65 76 65 72 0a                              |atever.|
$ grep -a -b --only-matching $'\x1b\x1f' test.txt 
12:

So in this case the 1B 1F is at position 12.

• Convert to integer (there is probably an easier way)

  $ echo 'ibase=16; '`xxd -u -ps -l 2 -s 12 test.txt`  | bc
  6943
  

• And the reverse:

  $ printf '%04X' 6943 | xxd -r -ps | hexdump -C
  00000000  1b 1f                                             |..|
  $ printf '%04X' 4242 | xxd -r -ps | hexdump -C
  00000000  10 92                                             |..|
  

• And putting it back in the file:

  $ printf '%04X' 4242 | xxd -r -ps | dd of=test.txt bs=1 count=2 seek=12 conv=notrunc
  2+0 records in
  2+0 records out
  2 bytes (2 B) copied, 5.0241e-05 s, 39.8 kB/s
  

• Result:

  $ hexdump -C test.txt
  00000000  68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f  72 6c 64 0a 10 92 77 68  |hello world...wh|
  00000010  61 74 65 76 65 72 0a                              |atever.|