Unix History: Why does hexdump default to word alignment?

[guy keren]

On 12/01/2011 01:55 PM, 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 ;-)
>

you can use a debugger only for the basic code. you cannot use a 
debugger when you're dealing with multiple threads that access the same 
shared data and could have race conditions. in those cases you need to 
run a test, find that the eventual data is incorrect, and track back 
using logs and friends, to find the culprit(s).

this is the common case in storage systems - but also in other types of 
systems.

--guy