Re: od command

[Paul Eggert]

"Vance, Jack D." <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello - can you please tell me what the numeric value is in the following 
> output?
> "0000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> *
> 1415102464".
>  
> The command used was "od -Ad -tx1" run on a wiped 10.0GB hard drive with 
> 10,005,037,056 bytes.

You're running an old version of 'od', which cannot output offsets
greater than 2*32 bytes; the offsets wrap around.  That bug was fixed
several years ago (in 2000 or 2001 -- I can't recall offhand).
I cannot reproduce the bug with coreutils 5.93 od
<ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.93.tar.gz>:

   518-penguin $ dd if=/dev/null of=big bs=10MiB seek=1024
   0+0 records in
   0+0 records out
   0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.010626 seconds, 0.0 kB/s
   519-penguin $ ls -l big
   -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 10737418240 Nov 22 12:49 big
   520-penguin $ od -Ad -tx1 big
   0000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
   *
   10737418240

I suggest upgrading to the latest version of 'od'.