---
title: "Displaying a .signed zone file in human-readable format"
slug: "aa-00546"
description: "BIND writes its backup signed zone file in raw format. Use named-checkzone to read the file contents in human-readable format."
updated: 2018-10-25T18:55:33Z
published: 2018-10-25T18:55:33Z
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://kb.isc.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How do I display the contents of a .signed zone file in human-readable format?

BIND 9.9.0 introduced inline signing. BIND writes its backup signed zone file in raw format (this is the format in which the zone data is stored in working memory - it is faster to load/write the zone data in this format).

Use `named-checkzone` to read the file contents in the format that you're more used to seeing:

```
named-checkzone -D -f raw myzone.net myzone.net.db.signed
```

In the above example:

- **myzone.net**  is the name of the zone
- **myzone.net.db**  is the zone master file
- **myzone.net.db.signed**  is the preserved copy of the inline-signed zone