Quickly convert characters into other formats using cat and od

Although cat is super common, it's less known that without a file provided, it reads from standard in.  So it can be used as a kind of input reflector.

Used with od, which 'dumps files in octal and and other formats', we have ourselves a quick and dirty encoder!

Simply pipe cat into od.

cat | od -x

Enter whatever character or string you want in some other form.  cat reads until it encounters and end-of-file (EOF), so hit enter, and then send an EOF.  You can do this with a newline ^d (CTRL+D).

Some useful od options are -x for hex and -b for octal.