OD

od (Octal Dump) is a standard Unix command line utility. It shows a byte per byte representation of any file.

Is useful at least in two contexts, when you want to see what's inside a binary data file (to reverse engineering it, let's say) and when you want to know exactly which ASCII byte codes are written on a text file.

The GNU implementation was written by Jim Meyering and as usual with GNU programs it has a enormous number of argument options.

In its default mode it prints 16 bytes of the file per line, in 8 octal numbers coding two bytes of input each, with the file offset of the input at the beginning of each output line.

You can change the base of the output (octal, hexadecimal, decimal, backslashed escaped non-printable ASCII characters,...), and the representation of the data (bytes, shorts, longs...).

Od (?), n. [G., fr. Gr. passage.] Physics

An alleged force or natural power, supposed, by Reichenbach and others, to produce the phenomena of mesmerism, and to be developed by various agencies, as by magnets, heat, light, chemical or vital action, etc.; -- called also odyle or the odylic force.

That od force of German Reichenbach Which still, from female finger tips, burnt blue. Mrs. Browning.

© Webster 1913.