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1

I have a file that contains a long list of integers written in ascii separated with newlines, like such:

-175
2
-19345
345592
-45
2355

etc...

I want to convert this file into a "binary" file containing the same integers, written as actual 4 byte integers.

What command-line tool can I use to achieve this?

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You need to specify the endian-ness. –  richard Aug 8 '14 at 9:45

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted 
perl -pe '$_=pack"l",$_' < infile > outfile

Uses the local endianness. Use l> instead of l for big-endian, and l< for little-endian.

See perldoc -f pack for more info.

Note that it's l as in lowercase L (for long integer), not the 1 digit.

$ printf '%s\n' 1234 -2 | perl -pe '$_=pack"l",$_'| od -vtd4
0000000        1234          -2
0000010
$ printf '%s\n' 1234 -2 | perl -pe '$_=pack"l>",$_'| od -vtx1
0000000 00 00 04 d2 ff ff ff fe
0000010
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With l, in my 64-bit machine: perl -MConfig -e 'print $Config{longsize}' , result is 8. –  cuonglm Aug 8 '14 at 9:56
2  
@Gnouc, Yes l is etymologically for long integer from the time where longs where 32bit wide. l has stayed and is guaranteed to stay 32bit wide even on systems where longs are wider (so l no longer means long in practice). Use l! if you want your system/compiler's longs –  Stéphane Chazelas Aug 8 '14 at 9:59
up vote 1 down vote

Another perl:

$ perl -pe '$_ = pack("i", $_)' file

i represents signed integer value (which is represent at least 4 bytes, depend on local C compiler). Use l option like @Stéphane Chazelas's answer for always use 32-bit.

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i is not guaranteed to be 4-byte wide. l is –  Stéphane Chazelas Aug 8 '14 at 9:41
    
@StéphaneChazelas: Yes, add note in my answer. –  cuonglm Aug 8 '14 at 10:33
    
The -l option adds unwanted 0x0a bytes to the output. –  Stéphane Chazelas Aug 8 '14 at 11:41
    
@StéphaneChazelas you are using a Unicode locale. –  hildred Aug 8 '14 at 16:25
    
@hildred, yes, as a matter of fact, I am, but the 0x0as are the newline characters added by -l regardless of the locale. –  Stéphane Chazelas Aug 8 '14 at 16:27

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