Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/02/19/15:04:15
At 09:03 AM 2/19/2002, David wrote:
>Hi Mark,
>
>Thank you for your reply to my message about the od utility: I wrote:
>
> >> I created at test file with 4 characters in it:
> >>
> >> HTTP
> >>
> >> Then, I run od -bcx and I get:
> >>
> >> 110 124 124 120 012 000
> >> H T T P \n \0
> >> 5448 5054 000a
>
>You wrote:
>
> > That is correct in this little-endian platform, see
> > http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/l/little-endian.html
> >
> > >You can see that the hex values in the last line are reversed.
> > >I think they should be 4854 5450 000a.
> >
> > Only if you were on a big-endian platform.
>
>I can understand what you are saying if I interpret it to mean that
>the hex storage values on my machine WindowsNT - which I assume from
>you message is a big-endian platform - are faithfully represented
>by the output from the od -bcx display.
No, PC's are little-endian.
>What then surprises me is that the octal representation of this
>same storage is 110 124 124 120 which is what I would expect.
>
>It seems to me that you are suggesting that the only correct
>representation of the hex storage values would require od to
>ouput an ascii value of THPT. I reject, and od itself contradicts,
>this interpretation of the storage values as being meaningful.
od formats the character representation to be in a "human readable"
format. It's a convenience. The hex still represents the data in the
machine-stored order though.
>I urge you to reconsider your opinion and to modify od to
>output 4854 5450.
I doubt you'll get your way. od has always worked this way and a change
in behavior is likely to be considered a bug by others. You'll probably
need to adjust your thinking when using od, find something else that fits
your way of thinking, or modify a local version to your liking. Still, I'm
not the official word on od maintenance so perhaps you can convince the
maintainers that you're right and everybody else is wrong! ;-)
Larry Hall lhall AT rfk DOT com
RFK Partners, Inc. http://www.rfk.com
838 Washington Street (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
Holliston, MA 01746 (508) 893-9889 - FAX
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