Dd

Manipulating by Bytes

Use the iflag=skip_bytes,count_bytes flags when working with data in bytes. The bs block size value will be ignored when these flags are used.

Question: When using the count_bytes flag, is this equivalent to bs=1?

Offset / Skipping Bytes

If you need to extract a chunk of data, say everything past byte 199232000 from a file:

$ dd if=blah.dat iflag=skip_bytes,count_bytes skip=199232000 | xxd

To get only 200 bytes of data instead:

$ dd if=blah.dat iflag=skip_bytes,count_bytes skip=199232000 count=200 | xxd

Or 2 kilobytes (2048 bytes):

$ dd if=blah.dat iflag=skip_bytes,count_bytes skip=199232000 count=2k | xxd