On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Nadav Har'El <[email protected]>wrote:
> > When you say "words" and "word aligned" here, you mean historic 2 byte > words. > Indeed. Is there any other meaning for "word" other than two bytes? > This is indeed *NOT* a very useful default on any modern computers. In some > old computers, like the PDP11 2 byte words were common and useful. > I'm still not convinced that it was a useful default. Since C which is the lingua fanca of Unix was clearly bytes based. > I guess nobody cares because since the 1970s when these tools were > written, nobody uses them any more ;-) I don't think I used "od" in at > least two decade... Well, I use them if I need to quickly inspect a file in binary format when I'm already using the command line. Say, I'm having a unit test that implements a binary protocol, and I want to verify with my eyes that I'm getting the right results. ./generate_msg | hexdump -C is quicker than ./generate_msg >tmp && sane_hex_editor tmp. How do you do that without hexdump, if you actually have this need at all. But maybe it's just a bad old habit of mine. I guess that if you get used to a more modern workflow, you can make using modern tools to inspect the same data just as quickly. As you can understand, less will not help me with that.
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