Print one byte signed number with hexdump

Question

I want to read /dev/input/mice with hexdump. Format is described at here at StackOverflow. What I need is to read one byte (flags), print it in hex format, then read two bytes (x and y move offset) and print each in signed decimal format.

I use hexdump from util-linux 2.28 on Arch Linux.

The best I was able to put together is

 hexdump /dev/input/mice -e '/1 "%03x" 2/1 " %03d" /0 "\n"'

The format string:

1. /1 "%03x" reads one byte and prints it as hex number
2. 2/1 " %03d" reads one byte and prints it as signed decimal integer, repeats two times
3. /0 "\n" reads zero bytes and prints end of line

The problem is that for value 0xFF the %d specifier prints 255 instead of -1. The format is taken from C, which extends the width properly, so how to force this proper width extension here?

Answer 1

This appears to be a bug in that implementation of hexdump.

The function responsible is

print(struct hexdump_pr *pr, unsigned char *bp)

in hexdump-display.c. It copies the correct number of bytes into a suitable variable, so that sign-extending can happen when passing the value to printf(). But for single bytes, it doesn't bother - it just dereferences the pointer, which was to an unsigned char.

case F_INT:
        {
        short sval; /* int16_t */
        int ival;   /* int32_t */
        long long Lval; /* int64_t, int64_t */

        switch(pr->bcnt) {
        case 1:
            printf(pr->fmt, (unsigned long long) *bp);
            break;
        case 2:
            memmove(&sval, bp, sizeof(sval));
            printf(pr->fmt, (unsigned long long) sval);
            break;

To fix it, patch the function to use the same "copy to local variable" approach:

--- text-utils/hexdump-display.c.orig   2015-10-05 15:18:43.458759033 +0100
+++ text-utils/hexdump-display.c        2016-08-19 14:58:35.507705329 +0100
@@ -146,13 +146,15 @@
            }
        case F_INT:
            {
+               char cval;      /* int8_t */
                short sval;     /* int16_t */
                int ival;       /* int32_t */
                long long Lval; /* int64_t, int64_t */

                switch(pr->bcnt) {
                case 1:
-                       printf(pr->fmt, (unsigned long long) *bp);
+                       memmove(&cval, bp, sizeof(cval));
+                       printf(pr->fmt, (unsigned long long) cval);
                        break;
                case 2:
                        memmove(&sval, bp, sizeof(sval));