bug#10045: Unix od command, reverses hex bytes in output

[Eric Blake]

tag 10045 notabug
thanks

On 11/14/2011 07:56 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> On Red Hat, the od command reverses the hex bytes.
> address@hidden PatientLoadDataFiles]$ cat a
> 123456
> address@hidden PatientLoadDataFiles]$ od -cx a
> 0000000   1   2   3   4   5   6  \n  \0
>         3231 3433 3635 000a
> 
> On HP-UX, it prints what you'd expect.
> plr02:lrxiusr:/plr02_users/lrxiusr/artdadamo> od -cx a
> 0000000    3132    3334    3536    0a00
>           1   2   3   4   5   6  \n
> 
> Is this a big-endian/little-endian issue?

Absolutely, which means it's not a bug, but a requirement by POSIX.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/od.html

If you want to output bytes in hex, then don't use the shorthand '-x'
(which is hardcoded to picking up machine-size short words, as in -tx2,
and thus exposes endianness issues), but instead use an explicit '-tx1'.

I'm closing this report.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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