RE: enhancement request for a long word byte swap option for 'dd'

[Mike Lockhart]

Paul,

Many thanks for your prompt response.

1       <existing practice> I've been googling for about a month or so
on this and haven't found anything.  I've also been bugging some
developer colleagues, and about the best we can come up with is
supplying a small byte-swap binary along with the script so it will run
on Linux.  I'm kinda loath to do this for 2 reasons:  One, it defeats
the purpose of a script (non-platform-specific) and two, my 'C' is
pretty toxic.

2       < alternatives> All I'm looking for is an end-to-end swap.  e.g.
swap 0000f841 to 41f80000 so that 'od' will return 3.1000000e+01

3       <Implemented the solution> As I said my 'C' is toxic, but if I
get something going on 1 above...

Regards

Mike

Mike Lockhart
Tier 2 Analyst
713-839-3188
address@hidden
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 11:01 PM
To: Mike Lockhart
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: enhancement request for a long word byte swap option for
'dd'

"Mike Lockhart" <address@hidden> writes:

> For 4-byte words (floats, long integers), however, this doesn't work.

>
> How does one go about asking for an enhancement, say, for 'dd' -

You've done it.  Thanks.

To make it happen, it would help if you:

 * Looked for existing practice.  Maybe some other dd has an option,
   or some dd competitor?  (We can learn from their mistakes.  :-)

 * Thought about the alternatives.  With 2 bytes there's only one way
   to swap, but with 4 bytes you have 23 ways, and with 8 bytes you
   have 40,319 ways.  How to specify them all?  Or do they all need to
   be possible?

 * Implemented the solution, and provided a patch.  Particularly, a
patch
   to the documentation -- that's the hardest part.

OK, OK, so I'm asking for a lot.  But it is a volunteer organization
here, we can always use more volunteers, and even if you can do only a
part of the work, that would help.
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