Can I tell xxd to not print any line breaks in its output and have my dump as one continuous line?
[user@localhost] : ~ $ echo -n "this is a long line and xxd is going to take multiple lines to print it" | xxd -p
746869732069732061206c6f6e67206c696e6520616e6420787864206973
20676f696e6720746f2074616b65206d756c7469706c65206c696e657320
746f207072696e74206974
What you need is the -c option.
# echo -n "this is a long line and xxd will print it as one line" | xxd -p -c 1000000
746869732069732061206c6f6e67206c696e6520616e64207878642077696c6c207072696e74206974206173206f6e65206c696e65
Here is some info from the documentation:
-c cols | -cols cols format octets per line. Default 16 (-i: 12, -ps: 30, -b: 6). Max 256.
Documentation says that the max value for "c" parameter is 256, but I tried greater values and it worked. Check it out:
# xxd -c 1000000 -p -l 1000000 /dev/urandom | wc -c
2000001
Here I dump one million bytes from /dev/random and I get a string of 2 million + 1 characters. Each byte from /dev/random is represented by 2 characters and additional byte is the final newline.
xxd -c 10000 xxd: invalid number of columns (max. 256).
-p / -ps
0 to the -c parameter to have it on a single line.
With xxd version 2022-01-14 (coming with vim 8.2.4088) or newer, you can now use -p and -c with value 0 as said in the man page:
-ccols |-colscolsFormat cols octets per line. Default 16 (
-i: 12,-ps: 30,-b: 6). Max 256. No maximum for-ps. With-ps, 0 results in one long line of output.
For example:
$ echo "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry." | xxd -p -c0
4c6f72656d20497073756d2069732073696d706c792064756d6d792074657874206f6620746865207072696e74696e6720616e64207479706573657474696e6720696e6475737472792e0a
-c 0 is just silently ignored instead of raising an error. Was burned by this today.
trto delete the newlines, e.g.... | xxd -p | tr -d \\nxxdis that it ignores whitespace for the reverse-rof its postcript/plain-pdump (or any plain hexdump for that matter). eg. The following line wraps with\n, but the reversed output is exactly what was input:echo {1..14} | xxd -p | xxd -p -rproduces output:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14\n– the\nis from theechohexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X"'instead ofxxd.tr -d '[[:blank:][:space:]]'.xxd -pintoxxd -p -c 0to make it single-line. (I posted it as an answer, but got removed because included in more complex answers…)