Re: Enhancement request for od, dd

[Bob Proulx]

Jon Clifton wrote:
> A big endian/little endian option would be helpful in od. 

What options are you currently using with od in your typical use?  I
ask because many people don't know that using 'od -tx1' will give a
consistent output on both little and big endian machines.  That is the
option combination that I generally use with od.

> As a software archeologist I frequently have to reverse engineer
> software and data structures and find od a very useful tool for
> examining data looking for clues.

Could you share a typical usage that would be beneficial with
byteswapping?

> I tend to use GNU Linux on Intel as a development host. Since some
> of the original systems have Endianness opposite of Intel I would
> like to be able to be able to override the host system Endian.

I wonder if the BSD hexdump command has any particular behavior here
that would be useful.  On my Debian GNU/Linux system hexdump is
installed as part of the 'bsdmainutils' package.

> I also noted that dd has a "swab" option (I guess that if for
> PDP-11) but no other choices.

In a recent discussion thread it was suggested that perhaps od should
be enhanced rather than od.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-02/msg00063.html

Bob