Re: Bug#792903: ITP: hdump -- Hexadecimal and ASCII dumper for binary files

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On 20/07/15 00:04, Paulo Kretcheu wrote:
>   Description     : Hexadecimal and ASCII dumper for binary files

Does this have significant advantages over these tools that are already
in the archive and likely to be near-ubiquitous on GNU systems?

* od -t x1 (part of coreutils, and a subset of its functionality is
  standardized in POSIX)
* hd, aka hexdump (part of bsdmainutils)
* xxd (part of vim-common)

I personally prefer xxd, because it gives reasonable output (hex +
ASCII) without requiring special command-line options, and can also be
used "in reverse" to patch or create binaries from hex input.

>    - Number of columns adjustable by constant in the source.

That's not much of an advantage in a binary distribution like Debian.
xxd can adjust this at runtime with the -c/-cols command-line option.

    S