Hi wisecracker,
Thank you for pointing out the iexdump (which has now been fixed in my post). I am not sure how that happened; I have hexdump in the code I copied and tried to paste.

It is good that you left the expansion $split_octal as is. With quotes around that expansion, the function won't work.

Yes. This is better. I hadn't noticed that the function was being called with an operand until after I had posted the script. One might also consider changing it to:

Code:

binary() { 
    while read octal
    do
        while [ "${#octal}" -gt 0 ]
        do
            subtx=${octal%"${octal#???}"}
            octal=${octal#"${subtx}"}
            printf '%b' "\0$subtx"
        done
    done
}

and invoke it with:

Code:

printf '%s\n' $split_octal | binary > output_file

or with:

Code:

binary < input_file > output_file

where input_file contains text similar to the string assigned to split_octal without the quotes (which would be handy if the data being processed is sometimes in a separate file and sometimes in a shell variable).