character encoding - Passing binary data as arguments in bash

Question

I need to pass binary data to a bash program that accepts command line arguments. Is there a way to do this?

It's a program that accepts one argument:

script arg1

But instead of the string arg1, I'd like to pass some bytes that aren't good ASCII characters - in particular, the bytes 0x02, 0xc5 and 0xd8.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Use the $'' quote style:

script $'x02xc5xd8'

Test:

printf $'x02xc5xd8' | hexdump -C
00000000  02 c5 d8