Request for enhancement: od option for end-to-end swap of multiple bytes

[Robert Dodier]

Hello,

I would like to ask if we can implement an option for od to
carry out end-to-end swaps of more than 2 bytes.
>From what I can tell, neither od, nor od in combination with
other coreutils programs, are capable of that at present.

I am specifically interested in 4 or 8 byte swaps since IEEE 754
single and double precision floats are 4 and 8 bytes respectively.
But there's certainly no need to limit a byte-swapping feature
to just these sizes.

It appears this feature has been requested before, but from what I
can tell it never went anywhere before. On looking at the documentation
for the most recent coreutils, I don't see anything about a byte-swap
option for od.

A patch was posted in this message, but from what I can tell it
was not incorporated into od.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-11/msg00278.html
Discussion seems to have gotten bogged down in minor issues.

I am a capable C programmer so I don't mind the idea of modifying
that patch or writing another one to implement this feature.

I look forward to your comments.

Robert Dodier

PS. For the record here are links to the previous discussions I found.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-11/msg00278.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-02/msg00077.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-04/msg00034.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-06/msg00255.html