A few years ago I mused about bootstrapping a development system under MS-DOS from the command line [1]. Now, I personally haven't done that, but I can see how it could be done.
But Edmund Evans came close to doing just that [2] (link via Hacker News [3]). He “cheated” by having a program that converted hex codes to binary. It's not that bad though, under Linux, you have a bit of an easier time generating binary data:
>
```
/bin/echo -e "\177\105\114\106\001\001\001\000..." >hex1
```
(it's coincidental that this method also uses octal values instead of hex—Unix began life in an octal environment).
That small quibble aside, Edmund did the bootstrapping procedure pretty much how I envisioned it.
And in following a few more links from the Hackers News commentary [4], I see that Kragen Sitaker referenced my previous entry and did the initial bootstrap [5] (making a program to read text into binary) from the MS-DOS command line (how odd—that mailing list with only one member [6]).
[2] http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/bcompiler.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503721
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503721
[5] http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April/000519.html