The problem#

Given a file which contains a list of floating point numbers in IEEE 754 single-precision format stored in big endian byte order, how do you view and manipulate this data using command-line tools? This is an actual problem one of my officemates had.

The solution#

$ od --endian=big -f file
0000000   1.7155696e-07   1.0432226e-08    4.563314e+30    6.162976e-33