On 12/01/2011 01:55 PM, 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 ;-)
you can use a debugger only for the basic code. you cannot use a
debugger when you're dealing with multiple threads that access the same
shared data and could have race conditions. in those cases you need to
run a test, find that the eventual data is incorrect, and track back
using logs and friends, to find the culprit(s).
this is the common case in storage systems - but also in other types of
systems.
--guy
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