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Long story short: how to print in a terminal the binary digits constituting a file e.g. a library .so or a simple text .txt file

PC hardware works with electrical signal (basically it's an ON/OFF behaviour) which is well logically translated by the binary system (digits 0s and 1s). Visualizing the content of a file would be an interesting educational exercise, as well as comparing a .txt and an executable that prints the same text.

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    Please provide sample input and output
    – Praveen Kumar BS
    Aug 7, 2021 at 8:42
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    You should explain the exact purpose of such output. Tody very few people can make sense of binary numbers; instead they use tools like objdump, hexdump or disassemblers.
    – U. Windl
    Aug 9, 2021 at 7:14
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    If you want to do a lot of visualization of binary numbers it would be useful for you to learn how and why hex numbers are used.
    – Rodney
    Aug 9, 2021 at 10:14

2 Answers 2

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xxd can give binary output. Example below.

$ cat foo
Hello World
$ xxd -b foo
00000000: 01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000  Hello
00000006: 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00001010  World.
$
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    Thanks! for sake of completeness it is included in the vim or gvim package on Arch Linux
    – mattia.b89
    Aug 7, 2021 at 10:21
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    BTW, that . at the end (00001010) is an ASCII newline NL. Since its first 4 bits are all zero, it's an unprintable ASCII control character so xxd just prints .
    – MSalters
    Aug 9, 2021 at 10:30
  • Is this ASCII bits or UTF8 bits?
    – Jeremy Boden
    Aug 11, 2021 at 17:21
  • The example file foo is ASCII encoded.
    – steve
    Aug 11, 2021 at 17:51
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    @JeremyBoden the right side is ASCII. A byte is 8 bits: 00000000. ASCII maps 7 bit numbers to characters 00000000 - 01111111. The first bit isn't used by ASCII, it's always 0. UTF-8 is a system that extends ASCII, essentially it says "if the first bit is 0, read the byte as ASCII, if the first bit is 1 read the next 1, 2 or 3 bytes as well and use this scheme to interpret that set of bytes as a number which is then mapped to a character". So it's ASCII, characters outside of ASCII will be displayed as .. ... or .....
    – Boris Verkhovskiy
    Feb 25 at 9:24
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With basenc (from coreutils)

$ echo 123 | basenc --base2msbf -w8
00110001
00110010
00110011
00001010
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