ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Hex dump

A hex dump is like taking a picture of a computer file and showing it to you in a special way that only uses numbers and letters. Each number and letter stands for a different part of the file.

It's like taking a book with lots of pages and breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces until you can see every single letter and word in the whole book. But instead of using normal letters and words, it's all turned into numbers and letters that look like this:

00400000 B8 00 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 A3 00 00 00 00 C3 CC ................

Each group of letters and numbers is called a "byte" and it tells you what's in that particular part of the file. The first part, "00400000," is the memory location where the file starts. The rest of the numbers and letters represent different instructions that the computer needs to follow to run the program.

When you look at a hex dump, it might seem like just a bunch of gibberish. But to people who know how to read it, a hex dump can give a lot of valuable information about what's inside a file and how it works.
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