How do you write specific bytes to a file?

You can use echo -e:

echo -e "\x66\x6f\x6f"

Do note that hexdump -C is what you want to dump the contents of the file in byte order instead of being interpreted as 4-byte words in network byte order.

This is the hexundump script from my personal collection:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
$^W = 1;
$c = undef;
while (<>) {
    tr/0-9A-Fa-f//cd;
    if (defined $c) { warn "Consuming $c"; $_ = $c . $_; $c = undef; }
    if (length($_) & 1) { s/(.)$//; $c = $1; }
    print pack "H*", $_;
}
if (!eof) { die "$!"; }
if (defined $c) { warn "Odd number of hexadecimal digits"; }

Simulate a byte train:

echo 41 42 43 44 | 

Change spaces into newlines so the while/read can easily parse them on by one

tr ' ' '\n' | 

Parse byte by byte

while read hex; do

Convert hex to ascii:

  printf \\x$hex

until end of input

done

If the files to parse are seriously big, you probably don't want to use bash because it is slow. PERL for example would be a better choice.