What does an asterisk "*" mean in hexdump output?

Question

I print MBR with hexdump and I get the following output:

000001a0  67 60 6f 70 65 72 61 74  69 6e 67 60 73 79 73 74  |g`operating`syst|
000001b0  65 6d 00 40 00 63 7b da  c5 f5 61 68 00 40 00 40  |[email protected]{...ah.@.@|
000001c0  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  |.@.@.@.@.@.@.@.@|
*
000001f0  00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40  00 40 00 40 00 40 55 ea  |.@.@.@.@.@.@.@U.|
00000200

What does the astersik * mean in the output?

Solution

A line in the hexdump output consisting just a * means same as the line above. This is mentioned in the hexdump's manpage at the -v option (easy to be overlooked).

Comments

[Admin]

It's dump and it means same as above.

[Admin]

OK, wonderfull, I was guessing it, but just wanted be sure :) Can you put it as answer?

[Admin]

* can mean more than one line be careful.

[BuvinJ]

Thanks! That was super important for my parser to take into account!

[ShreevatsaR]

@BuvinJ (or rather anyone else): You can just pass -v to avoid this, so that your parser doesn't need to take it into account.

[Smeterlink]

* can mean one line of more, as many as there are until the proper offset.

[detly]

This is super confusing when it's actually the first and only thing that hexdump shows, but what it really means is you've got a file with nothing but zeros in it.