Why does newline come before space in the output of hexdump?

Question

Using hexdump, printing these characters in the "canonical" format gives the output that I expect, while the default format throws me off.

$ echo " " |hexdump                  # Reversed?
0000000 0a20
0000002

$ echo -n " " |hexdump               # Ok, fair enough.
0000000 0020

$ echo  " " |hexdump -C              # Canonical
00000000  20 0a                      | .|
00000002

With a different string, such as "123", the output is even more confusing:

$ echo  "123" |hexdump
0000000 3231 0a33
0000004

The output here does not seem "reversed", but rather it is shuffled. What (briefly) is going on here?

This looks like a tool the Git authors worked on. It takes a simple task, and makes it difficult... — jww, Jun 30 '16 at 16:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 06 '12 at 03:55

1

The default format is 16-bit little-endian unsigned ints.

The manual page of hexdump explains the default format as well:

 -x  Two-byte hexadecimal display.  Display the input offset in hexadecimal, 
     followed  by eight  space-separated, four-column, zero-filled, two-byte 
     quantities of input data, in hexadecimal, per line.

  (...)

  If  no format strings are specified, the default display is equivalent to 
  specifying the -x option.

edited Dec 06 '12 at 03:55

Ярослав Рахматуллин

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answered Dec 06 '12 at 03:06

Nicole Hamilton

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Perhaps not part of a brief answer, but do you know why _that_ is the default format? I mean to ask, what is it convenient for? – Ярослав Рахматуллин Dec 06 '12 at 03:58
It's left over from when Unix was invented on 16-bit minicomputers in the 70s. – Nicole Hamilton Dec 06 '12 at 05:11

Why does newline come before space in the output of hexdump?

1 Answers1