Converting integers to binary with xxd

I have a file, output.log, that has a list of space, ' ', separated integers ranging from [-2048,2048]. I am attempting to convert this to a binary file with xxd. I'm using the command,

xxd -r -p output.log > output.bin

However when I read the file back with xxd I lose all of the signs (-) and receive some values greater than 2048. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks.

edit: With sample data...

$ cat test
4 0 -3 -2 -1 200

$ xxd -r -p test > test.bin

$ xxd test.bin
0000000: 4012 00            @..

Maybe I am misunderstanding what xxd is doing, what I expected to see after the last command is to see my original input data being displayed back. Is this not correct?

With much larger data sets I will see the correct values show up from time to time but there is still a ton of noise in the output.

Solution

There may be some strange characters in your input source file, xxd works just fine with numbers. Try looking at your data using octal dump od -c input to look for anything strange.

$ echo '-3000 -2048 -1 0 1 2048 3000' > foo.input
$ cat foo.input
-3000 -2048 -1 0 1 2048 3000
$ xxd foo.input > foo.hex
$ cat foo.hex
0000000: 2d33 3030 3020 2d32 3034 3820 2d31 2030  -3000 -2048 -1 0
0000010: 2031 2032 3034 3820 3330 3030 0a          1 2048 3000.
$ xxd -r foo.hex > foo.output
$ cat foo.output
-3000 -2048 -1 0 1 2048 3000