Unix History: Why does hexdump default to word alignment?

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 01:55:24PM +0200, 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 ;-)

Regarding new siblings of od, and just in case someone expects a useful
piece of information in this thread - I happened to use several times
xxd, which can also do the reverse - convert its output back to binary -
so you can use it together with your $EDITOR as a poor man's binary
editor. I guess people used uuencode/uudecode for this in the past,
perhaps I did too, but xxd is much more comfortable.
-- 
Didi