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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T07:22:15+00:00

What is the difference between these commands? Why does the first match, but grepping

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What is the difference between these commands? Why does the first match, but grepping the individual file hexdumps returns nothing?

$ hexdump -C DRAFT* FAIL* RCV* | grep "49 d0 38 ec 06 a1 c3"
0001f430  49 d0 38 ec 06 a1 c3 7a  10 39 9c 07 bd cd 66 10  |I.8....z.9....f.|
$ hexdump -C RCV* | grep "49 d0 38 ec 06 a1 c3"
$ hexdump -C DRAFT* | grep "49 d0 38 ec 06 a1 c3"
$ hexdump -C FAIL* | grep "49 d0 38 ec 06 a1 c3"
$ ls
DRAFT  DRAFT.HDR  DRAFTUSED  FAILED  FAILED.HDR  FAILEDUSED  RCVD  RCVD.HDR  RCVDUSED  SENT  SENT.HDR  SENTUSED  SMS.html

The files are from my Samsung Sync SGH-A707. I’m trying to parse these sms files so I can make a plain-text backup of my text messages. The string I’m grepping for is a control message I encoded according to http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/hello.html

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Hexdump will concatenate the files, then convert to hex. If the character sequence is split across a line boundary, then it will not match your grep. I suspect this happens in some cases, but not others.

    You could try using the -n option with a large number (larger than the files you are using) to put the whole output on a single line.

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