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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Byte-swap an entire file using perl

    David Christensen

    By David Christensen
    April 20, 2012

    I recently needed to byte-swap an input file, and came up with an easy way with perl:

    $ perl -0777ne 'print pack(q{V*},unpack(q{N*},$_))' inputfile > outputfile
    

    This will byte-swap 4-byte sequences.  If you need to byte-swap 2-byte sequences, you can just adjust the formats for pack/unpack to the lower-case version like so:

    $ perl -0777ne 'print pack(q{v*},unpack(q{n*},$_))' inputfile > outputfile
    

    (Of course there are more efficient ways to handle this, but for a quick and dirty job this may just be what you need.)

    We use the -0777 option to ensure perl reads the input file in its entirety and doesn’t affect newlines, etc.

    perl


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