On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 01:55:24PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Thu, Dec 01, 2011, guy keren wrote about "Re: Unix History: Why does > hexdump default to word alignment?": > > apparently, you did not use binary data serialization in the past > > two decades. when you serialize data and store it into a file (also > > on the network), it is very useful to be able to see the data as > > 2-byte or 4-byte or whatever-byte numbers, when debugging. > > Well, for debugging you typically use tools like a debugger (gdb, ddd, > etc.) or network sniffer or something - and those have their own methods > of displaying data, and do not use od. So using the actual "od" command > in a shell or shell-script is not something I ended up doing in recent years. > I don't think I even noticed the "new" hexdump sibling of od cropped up > in Linux ;-)
Regarding new siblings of od, and just in case someone expects a useful piece of information in this thread - I happened to use several times xxd, which can also do the reverse - convert its output back to binary - so you can use it together with your $EDITOR as a poor man's binary editor. I guess people used uuencode/uudecode for this in the past, perhaps I did too, but xxd is much more comfortable. -- Didi _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
