ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard that represents characters as integers. ASCII codes are used to represent text in computers, communication equipment, and other devices that work with text.
In Linux, the ascii command is used to display or convert ASCII values for characters. It can be used to display the ASCII value for a character, or to display the character for a given ASCII value.
Here is an example of using the ascii command to display the ASCII value for the character “A”:
# ascii A 65
And here is an example of using the ascii command to display the character for the ASCII value 65:
# ascii 65 A
If you encounter the below error while running the ascii command:
ascii: command not found
you may try installing the below package as per your choice of distribution:
| OS Distribution | Command |
|---|---|
| OS X | brew install ascii |
| Debian | apt-get install ascii |
| Ubuntu | apt-get install ascii |
| Arch Linux | pacman -S ascii |
| Kali Linux | apt-get install ascii |
| Fedora | dnf install ascii |
| Raspbian | apt-get install ascii |
ascii Command Examples
1. Show ASCII aliases of a character:
# ascii a
2. Show ASCII aliases in short, script-friendly mode:
# ascii -t a
3. Show ASCII aliases of multiple characters:
# ascii -s tldr
4. Show ASCII table in decimal:
# ascii -d
5. Show ASCII table in hexadecimal:
# ascii -x
6. Show ASCII table in octal:
# ascii -o
7. Show ASCII table in binary:
# ascii -b
8. Show options summary and complete ASCII table:
# ascii