Writing bits (not hex values) to file in Linux

Question

I am trying to teach how a computer operates using binary information. To showcase this, I would like to take a string of bits: 011010000110010101101100011011000110111100100000011101110110111101110010011011000110010000001010 and write it to a file.

I can do it using HEX: echo -n -e \\x48\\x65\\x6c\\x6c\\x6f\\x20\\x57\\x6f\\x72\\x6c\\x64\\x0a > text.txt but haven't been able to figure out how to do it using binary numbers.

Is it possible to write raw bits to a file using a Linux terminal?

Shawn · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-19 11:14:52Z

1

perl to the rescue:

$ perl -e 'print pack("B*", $ARGV[0])' 011010000110010101101100011011000110111100100000011101110110111101110010011011000110010000001010 > test.txt
$ xxd test.txt
00000000: 6865 6c6c 6f20 776f 726c 640a            hello world.

answered Aug 19, 2022 at 11:14

Shawn

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1 Comment

Chr1sCon Over a year ago

This should work! Thank you so much!

Philippe · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-19 11:13:20Z

1

Try this :

#!/usr/bin/env bash

string=011010000110010101101100011011000110111100100000011101110110111101110010011011000110010000001010

for ((i=0; i<${#string}; i+=8)); do
    printf %b $(printf '\\x%02x' $((2#${string:i:8})))
done

answered Aug 19, 2022 at 11:13

Philippe

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1 Comment

Chr1sCon Over a year ago

Love the "workaround" of converting it to hex values first. Clever algorithm! Thanks!

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