A Weird Imagination

Floats in shell

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

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sh Rube Goldbergs

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The problem#

The command-line is an expressive interface which allows powerful commands to be written concisely. Sometimes you want a longer, less direct way of implementing a task. For example, merely writing wc -l is far too straightforward for counting lines in a file. Surely we can devise a more convoluted way to accomplish that task.

The solution#

cat "$file" |
    expr $(od -t x1 |
    sed 's/ /\n/g' |
    grep '^0a$' |
    sed -z 's/\n//g' |
    wc -c) / 2

The details#

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