Shell Programming and Scripting

Code:

export LC_CTYPE=C
dump() { od -An -vtu1 "$1" | tr -c 0-9 \\n; }
paste -d \\n <(dump hi) <(dump lo) | awk 'NF {printf "%c",$0}' > newbin

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 06:29 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:07 PM ----------

That's not quite correct. read -N (and read -n) deal with characters. When dealing with binaries, you must work with bytes. Your solution is at the mercy of the current locale.

You need to explicitly specify a single-byte character locale, such as with LC_CTYPE=C (or LC_CTYPE=POSIX).

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 06:51 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:29 PM ----------

Looking at my (years old) post in the thread referenced by the OP, I see a couple of bugs:

Code:

od -An -vtd1 file | tr -cs '0-9' '\n' | awk 'NF{printf("%c",$0) > (++i%2?"hi":"lo")}'

(1) od is using a signed format when it must be unsigned, and (2) the AWK command's output depends on locale. Both are fixed in this post's recommendation.

Live and learn.

Regards,
Alister