D-A(1)

📦 version 7.44.0, in nixpkgs unstable

💖 D-A(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the d-a page — that's the BRL-CAD manual, and this little icon is about turning double-precision binary numbers into ASCII. yes, from robot soup to human-readable. let's go ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

d-a — convert double-precision binary numbers to ASCII 💅

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

d-a [-n] < doubles > ascii

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so here's the vibe: d-a reads a whole stream of machine-native double-precision (8-byte) binary floating point values from standard input, and writes each one out as a decimal number in ASCII text to standard output — one value per line, no cap. the values get formatted with up to nine significant digits. 🎀

and because the input is raw binary, d-a flat-out refuses to run when standard input is a terminal. like, it will not be doing that. 🙈 the inverse conversion — ASCII text back into binary doubles — is handled by a-d(1), if you need to go the other way.

⚠️ heads up bestie: this command is deprecated and is scheduled for removal. it prints a deprecation warning on startup. you've been warned, fr fr 💀

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -n — number the output. every line gets prefixed with a zero-based index showing where that value sits in the stream. cute lil position tags 👑

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

⭐ Example 1. Inspect a binary double stream

a-d 1.0 2.5 -3.75 | d-a

this generates three binary doubles with a-d(1) and converts them right back into human-readable ASCII, printing one value per line. round trip slay 🔥

⭐ Example 2. Index the values in a binary file

d-a -n < values.d | head

reads doubles out of the file values.d and prints each value preceded by its position in the stream — which is genuinely so useful for locating a particular sample when you're debugging signal-processing pipelines built with dmod(1) or dconv(1). iykyk 🧚

🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

brlcad(1), a-d(1), dconv(1), dmod(1)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

BRL-CAD Team 👑

This software is Copyright (c) 1989-2026 by the United States Government as represented by U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

😭 BUG REPORTS 😭

Reports of bugs or problems should be submitted via electronic mail to devs@brlcad.org — they genuinely want to hear from you, bestie 🫶

and that's the whole page!! this gem ships as part of BRL-CAD (the BRL-CAD source, with that 1989-2026 copyright run we mentioned up top) — mwah, go convert some doubles responsibly 💖🎀🦋

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