Project History

Project History

portable-hexdump began in 2024 as a "survival tool."

The Origin Story

The maintainer found themselves in a highly restricted recovery environment where standard utilities like od and xxd were unavailable. Faced with the need to inspect raw binary data from within a minimal Bourne shell, the first version of this script was written on the spot.

Evolution

What started as a single-purpose snippet has since evolved into a robust, POSIX-compliant utility. The goal is to provide a reliable fallback for any Unix-like system, ensuring that system administrators and developers always have a way to peek at binary data, no matter how limited their environment might be.

Release Milestones

• v1.0.0 (2026-04-21): Initial public release.
  • Full POSIX compliance.
  • mdoc manpage and Makefiles.
  • Color themes and customizable width/offset.