Hexadecimal Concatenator

Description
hc is based on an ancient tool I wrote it back in the late 1980s using the SEKA-Assember under AmigaOS 1.2 to be able to examine binary files. This hex dumper used to be more comfortable and featured than the -h-option of the type tool. When I ported it to Unix in 1992 I kept the handwritten binary-to-ASCII-hex encoding just for fun. This time, it was not based on hand optimized M68k-code, but at least better than just using printf("%x"). However, the code is not optimized for Unix at all, using a large amount of read(1) system calls to read in small chunks of data. Since hc was the first tool I ever wrote under Linux it may be regarded as a programming practice rather than a highly efficient tool.
hc offers many interesting options (even more than the hexdump(1) utility being available in those days), although not as much as it could. Maybe I should go through the code again when its tenth Unix anniversary draws near.

Manual
Online manual.

Download
The latest version is hc-0.1.2.tar.gz.

Last modified at 1998-09-15.