[SOLVED] How do you get plain text from binary where the plaintext is formatted by itself?

How do you get plain text from binary where the plaintext is formatted by itself?

Desired output of something like "xxd -b file":

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

..etc

then followed by

plaintext here

Actual output:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 plai

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 n te

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 xt h

Hopefully communicates what I'm getting at. This is just a minor issue I encountered doing a beginner CTF, but it felt very off and sloppy to copy paste just one line at a time, since highlighting treats the actual information I want in the right column as just part the array of text. I've tried a few different flags with xxd and read the man page, but I have not found an option that outputs the plaintext by itself or in a manner that is more readable. Is there another tool I should be using, ideally one that is common on most linux distros?

Solution

Process the file twice, once by xxd, once by cat. Use cut to remove the plaintext from the xxd output:

xxd -b file | cut -d' ' -f1-8 ; cat file

Use 2-8 if you aren't interested in the positions.