How to convert binary file to ASCII

[Glenn Morton_1]

This should be an easy one.
I can't seem to find a command to convert my
binary file to ASCII.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Glenn,

There is no standard command in HP-UX to do this.
There is a pkg btoa on the porting center that purports to do this. Here's the link:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Misc/btoa-5.2/

I've never used it, though.

HTH,
Jeff

[Patrick Wallek]

As Jeff said, there is no standard unix command to do this.

You can use the 'strings' command to see what printable characters are in the binary file. Do a 'man strings' for more details.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Earth to Glenn:

Depending upon the layout of your binary file, this can be a far from trivial task. As mentioned, if it's easy you can use the strings command to recognize portions of your data (if the strings are encoded as ASCII rather than EBCDIC) or you can use the od command with various options to display integers, charaters, etc. The real problem comes in coverting the 1st 8 bytes of record to floating-point, the next 2 bytes as a short unsigned integer, the next 4 bytes as a signed integer, the next 6 bytes COBOL COMP data, and the next 30 characters as a string, .... . If that is the case the it's time to do real programming (at a minimum Perl but usually C or C++).

Just knowing the exact layout of each record is the first hurdle (and just hope you don't have to deal with variable length records).

[Glenn Morton_1]

Thanks everyone. Now I understand why I could not find the command.

[Frank Slootweg]

Well, it depends what you want to do *with* the converted file, but there *is* a standard *HP-UX* command: vis(1).

With the "-n" option of vis and inv, you can make a simple binary editor:

vis -n file.txt
vi file.txt
inv -n file.bin

[Rory R Hammond]

It would be helpful if you defined what you mean by a binary file.
text, database, archive, executable, pdf, jpeg etc..

If you mean text files transported into your system useng ftp. it is sometime usefull to do so by using the binary option. inorder to preserve CR/LF (carraige returns-linefeeds) or
LF
or
CR
MSDOS uses CR/LF
UNIX uses LF
MAC uses CR.

If your intent is to convert a
"binary" MSDOS text file to a UNIX text file. There are all kinds of ways (tr, sed, awk, perl).

PDF, DATABASE and compressed files would require some els

Rory

[Ryan Green]

You could use uuencode(1). It will convert binary to ascii for email transmission.

ryan