hexdump(3)

hexdump3

Dump a block of bytes to standard out in hexadecimal form

Usage

#include <libutil.h>

void

hexdump(void *ptr, int length, const char *hdr, int flags);

Library

System Utilities Library (libutil, -lutil)

Overview

The hexdump() function prints an array of bytes to standard out in hexadecimal form, along with the ASCII representation of the bytes, if possible. By default, each line of output will start with an offset count, followed by 16 hexadecimal values, followed by 16 ASCII characters.

ptr

Pointer to the array of bytes to print. It does not need to beNUL -terminated.

length

Number of bytes to print.

hdr

Pointer to aNUL -terminated character string that will be prepended to each line of output. A value of NULL implies that no header will be printed.

flags

Flags for controlling the formatting of the output.

Bits 0-7

Integer value of the number of bytes to display on each line. A value of 0 implies that the default value of 16 will be used.

Bits 8-15

Character ASCII value to use as the separator for the hexadecimal output. A value of 0 implies that the default value of 32 (ASCII space) will be used.

HD_OMIT_COUNT

Do not print the offset column at the beginning of each line.

HD_OMIT_HEX

Do not print the hexadecimal values on each line.

HD_OMIT_CHARS

Do not print the character values on each line.

Releases

39 releases since FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE; the text changed 26 times.

  1. 8.0
  2. 8.1
  3. 8.2
  4. 8.3
  5. 8.4
  6. 9.0
  7. 9.1
  8. 9.2
  9. 9.3
  10. 10.0
  11. 10.1
  12. 10.2
  13. 10.3
  14. 10.4
  15. 11.0
  16. 11.1
  17. 11.2
  18. 11.3
  19. 11.4
  20. 12.0
  21. 12.1
  22. 12.2
  23. 12.3
  24. 12.4
  25. 13.0–13.2
  26. 13.3–14.3
  27. 14.4–16.0

History

The hexdump() function first appeared in FreeBSD 6.4.

Authors

This manual page was written by Scott Long.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.