I have a binary executable which was created via GNU's ld in Linux.

I performed this command on it to see the contents in hex:
od -t cxC myprogram

Everything looks fine, except there's one line in od's output that contains just an asterisk, like this:
(begins sample, formatting probably butchered)
0000300 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0000340 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 033 \0 \0 \0 001 \0 \0 \0
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1b 00 00 00 01 00 00 00
(ends sample)

I don't know what that asterisk record implies. I do notice that the immediately previous line contains only NULs, and it is the only line of od's output to consist of only NULs, so maybe that's it, but I don't know for certain.

Anyone know what that asterisk line means? Here is my version of od:
od (GNU coreutils) 8.19

I just noticed now that I've posted this: there isn't a line 320. The asterisk seems to be representing some sort of gap, perhaps due to the NULs?

It might mean repetition: the missing lines are equal to the last printed line.

1 members found this post helpful.

That must be it. I just tested this against a regular text file with various repeating characters and that seems to be what's happening.

Thanks!