Shell command for adding a byte to a file

elektronaut · 06-10-2007, 07:02 AM

Hi,

I'm trying to use my digital audio player with Linux. The playlists have to be in UTF-16 format with byte order mark (BOM). With the help of unix2dos and iconv I managed to convert them from UTF-8 to UTF-16 with the Windows line breaks (CR & LF). It works if I add the BOM with a hex editor, but I'm looking for a shell command so that I can put it all together in script in order to automate the process. It would have to be able to add a byte at the beginning of a binary file. I've been googling for this for quite some time now, can somebody help me out, please?

stzein · 06-10-2007, 07:18 AM

Maybe you can make 2 files. The existing playlist file and a 1 byte file. Then do something like this:

Code:

cat 1byte.file > finalplaylist.file && cat playlist.file >> finalplaylist.file

I'm not sure if this works at all for your purpose as it may very well mess up your format again, but at least it's easy to try.

Here's the manual of the GNU coreutils, maybe there's something in there that can be of use to you (tr for example might be of use for the translation part, although you seem to have a solution for that already)

elektronaut · 06-11-2007, 06:02 AM

Thanks, stzein,

that was a good idea. As cat doesn't append, I'm now using this combination:

Code:

cat 1byte.file > finalplaylist.file && dd if=playlist.file of=finalplaylist.file oflag=append conv=notrunc

I'm happy that I got a working solution, but if there is a way that would make the 1byte.file obsolete, I would still be happy to know it. Then a bash script alone could do the job.