RE: Enhancement request for od, dd

[Jon Clifton]

Bob,

I failed to make my point clear. I was trying to see the data as float or 
double and they are just garbage without appropriate byteswapping.

I think the dd option "swab" is only for PDP-11 type data. It isn't the correct 
format for Intel i386 and I can't remember if the bytes in a double end up 
87654321 or 43218765 on Intel. 

I guess an endian option for od would only be useful for -t formats larger than 
1 byte such as -tfF or -tfD.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Proulx [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:40 PM
To: Jon Clifton
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Enhancement request for od, dd


It would be most appreciated if you would group reply (or just to the
list since I am subscribed) to keep the others on the mailing list
involved.  Also the mailing list mail is archived so that others can
benefit from the discussion later.

Jon Clifton wrote:
> My default alias for os is:
> alias od='od -t xz -Ax '

Ah, there is what I was fishing for.  You are using -tx without a
size.  It is defaulting to word size.  Please try using it with -tx1
and look at the output.  Is that acceptable?  That should generate the
same output on either big or little endian machines.

  od -tx1z -Ax

> After I learned enough about the data format I wrote a small C program on 
> Linux that used ntohl() to byteswap the data where required and format it 
> into ASCII.
  
Is that basically the same as the following?

  dd conv=swab | od -txz

Sounds like you are on track.

Bob