Re: octal dump

["s. keeling" <keeling@nucleus.com>]

Girish Kulkarni <girish@hri.res.in>:
> 
>  I was trying to understand octal dumps today that can be obtained
>  using od.  But two questions cropped up:
> 
>  1. When would an octal dump be useful?  Surely not in perusing text

Sure.  ftp any text file from a Windows or Mac using binary mode.  od
-c that file, and you'll be enlightened.

>     files?!  And when people say they use octal (or hex) dump to check
>     and edit binary files, how do they learn to do so?

I used to work with seismic data, and dumping a field tape in hex to
paper was the simplest way to figure out what recording format they
used.  SEG-A, -B, -C.  This was in the '70s.


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