NAME

ascii2binary - Convert ASCII numbers to binary

SYNOPSIS

ascii2binary [flags]

DESCRIPTION

ascii2binary reads input consisting of a sequence of ASCII textual representations of numbers, separated by whitespace, and produces as output the binary equivalents. The type (unsigned integer, signed integer, or floating point number) and size of the binary output is selected by means of command line flags. The default is unsigned character. Input is checked both for format errors and to ensure that the number requested can be represented in a number of the requested binary type and size.

INPUT FORMAT

The input formats supported are exactly those supported by strtod(3) for floating point numbers, by strtoll(3) for signed integers, and by strtoull(3) for unsigned integers, except that, unlike strtod(3) floating point numbers may have thousands separators. This means that by default integers may be decimal, octal, or hexadecimal, determined by the usual conventions. The command line flag -b may be used to specify another base for integer conversions.

COMMAND LINE FLAGS

Long options may not be available on some systems.

-b,--base <base>

set base in range [2,36] for integer conversions. The base may be either an integer or:

(b)binary

(o)octal

(d)ecimal

(h)exadecimal.

-h,--help

print help message

-L,locale <locale>

Set the LC_NUMERIC facet of the locale to <locale>.

-s,--sizes

print sizes of types on current machine and related information

-t,--type <type>

set type and size of output

The following are the possible output types. Note that some types may not be available on some machines.

d double

f float

sc signed char

ss signed short

si signed int

sl signed long

sq signed long long

uc unsigned char

us unsigned short

ui unsigned int

ul unsigned long

uq unsigned long long

-v,--version

identify version

-X,--explain-exit-codes

print a summary of the exit status codes.

EXIT STATUS

The following values are returned on exit:

0 SUCCESS: The input was successfully converted.
1 INFO: The user requested information such as the version number or usage synopsis and this has been provided.
2 SYSTEM ERROR: An error resulted from a failure of the operating system such as an i/o error or inability to allocate storage.
3 COMMAND LINE ERROR: The program was called with invalid or inconsistent command line flags.
4 RANGE ERROR: This means that the input may be well-formed but cannot be represented as the required type. For example, if the input is the string 983 and ascii2binary is requested to convert this into an unsigned byte, ascii2binary will exit with a RANGE ERROR because 983 exceeds the maximum value representable in an unsigned byte, which is 255.
5 INPUT ERROR: This means that the input was ill-formed, that is that it could not be interpreted as a number of the required type. For example, if the input is 0x2A and a decimal value is called for, an INPUT ERROR will be returned since 0x2A is not a valid representation of a decimal integer.

AUTHOR

Bill Poser (billposer@alum.mit.edu)

LICENSE

GNU General Public License, version 3