Here's a one-liner...

perl -0777e'$i++,print $_.($i%20?" ":"\n")for unpack"(H2)*",<>;print"\
+n"' file
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Update: Cleaned up and shortened the one-liner. I'm just assuming that you want a hex viewer. You weren't very explicit.

Update2: a little more squishing.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

TMTOWTDI, some not involving Perl at all: man od (see also a PPT implementation).

An old script of mine will do this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@fill= qw( .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. );

if (scalar(@ARGV)) {
        foreach $file(@ARGV) {
                $size= -s $file;
                $form= length(sprintf("%x",$size))-1;
                ++$form unless $form;
                print "File: ",$file,"\n";
                open (IN,$file);
                &dump(*IN, $form);
                close (IN)
        }
}
else {
        &dump(*STDIN, 4);
}

sub dump {
        local(*IN, $form)= @_;
        my ($buf, $i);
        while ($rb= read(IN, $buf, 16)) {
                @x= unpack("H2" x $rb, $buf);
                $buf=~ s/[\x00-\x1f\x7f-\xff]/./g;
                $buf.= ' ' x (16-length($buf));
                printf ("%0${form}x0: %s [%s]\n"
                ,$i++,
                ,sprintf ("%s %s %s %s  %s %s %s %s - %s %s %s %s  %s 
+%s %s %s", @x, @fill)
                ,$buf
                );
        }
}
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Thank all of you for the help. That dumped out the file in hex, now I can parse through and get the ascii. Thanks again

now I can parse through and get the ascii

That makes it sound like you want to read through a file that contains both "printable" and "non-printable" byte values, and display only the printable (ascii) stuff. On unix, there is a command called "strings" to do exactly that.

A perl implementation would be something like this (assuming the file is not too big to hold in memory):

$_ = do { local $/; <> };
s/[^\t\n\r -~]+/\n/g;
print;
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You could tweak that to print only strings that are some minimum length, etc. Anything else you know about the binary file (e.g. strings of interest are all terminated by null bytes, or something like that) could be used to good effect in making sure you only print the interesting parts.

It sounds like you're looking for the strings command.

-derby

Perhaps you need to be a little more explicit about the nature of the binary file and the way you want to show it in ASCII. For example, do you simple want to run through the file byte by byte and show the hex values for each byte? It may help to tell us what you are trying to achieve.

If it is, for example, an image file then you're not likely to output it as text to display in a reasonable way

Sure, just use aalib. HTH.HAND.