baseconv

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Convert a number between numeral bases -- binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal -- with positional from to number arguments.

A thin wrapper over bc that does the bookkeeping bc won't: case-folding hex digits, validating that the input is well-formed for the source base, and accepting friendly base names (hex, dec) and abbreviations (h, d, x) instead of forcing you to remember which numeric base goes where in obase/ibase. Aliased to a single letter it becomes the fastest way to do one-off conversions from the shell.

Quick start

$ baseconv hex dec ff
255

Common examples

Decimal to hex:

$ baseconv dec hex 255
FF

Binary to hex (byte-wide):

$ baseconv bin hex 11111111
FF

Hex to binary (multi-byte):

$ baseconv hex bin deadbeef
11011110101011011011111011101111

Numeric base names work too:

$ baseconv 16 2 ff
11111111

Single-letter abbreviations for max brevity:

$ baseconv h d ff
255

Base aliases

Each base accepts its name, a single-letter abbreviation, and its numeric value:

Base Aliases
Binary bin, b, 2
Octal oct, o, 8
Decimal dec, d, 10
Hexadecimal hex, h, x, 16

x is included for hex because h is already overloaded as the help flag in many tools and because 0x is the standard hex prefix.

Base names and hex digits are case-insensitive. Hex output is uppercased.

Reference

All options

Flag Description
-h, --help Show help

Exit codes

Code Meaning
0 Success
2 Usage error (missing arg, invalid base, invalid digit for base)
3 Dependency error (bc missing)

Dependencies