Converting ASCII .txt to something I can work with on a Mac.

[Voyager]

@Sunspace

I opened a console prompt and tried the ‘old’ command and didn’t get anything. However, googling revealed a hexdump command that seems to be quite flexible.

That should have been od. Damn.

I tried it on Solaris, and I know it worked on System V when I was at Bell Labs. Solaris is a descendant of BSD, so it should be okay.

[Sunspace]

@Voyager

That should have been od. Damn.

I tried it on Solaris, and I know it worked on System V when I was at Bell Labs. Solaris is a descendant of BSD, so it should be okay.

There’s a man page for ‘od’ on my Mac. And it works.

[Terminus_Est]

@mks57

Unix uses LF (AKA newline or NL). Old Macs use CR. PCs use CR/LF. Aren’t standards wonderful?

Ah, crap. I just knew I’d get them inverted.

[Voyager]

@Sunspace

There’s a man page for ‘od’ on my Mac. And it works.

Great.

But our poor OP is probably mumbling to herself “ask a simple questions and those geeks start speaking in code words.”

But you’ve given me the first reason I’ve ever seen to buy a Mac some day. I can toss the stupid gui and use command line, like Ghod intended.

[Sunspace]

@Voyager

Great.

But our poor OP is probably mumbling to herself “ask a simple questions and those geeks start speaking in code words.”

But you’ve given me the first reason I’ve ever seen to buy a Mac some day. I can toss the stupid gui and use command line, like Ghod intended.

If you download the TextWrangler editor, it installs command-line tools as well. TextMate does the same: you can type ‘mate <filename>’ at the prompt and it will pop up a new window containing TextMate with <filename> loaded. Integration between the command line and the GUI. Neat.

EMACS is there as well.

Some of these may not be installed on an off-the-shelf system; I installed XCode and the developer toolset to get X11 so I could run The Gimp.