I-A(1)

💖 I-A(1) — the BRL-CAD glow-up edition 💖

okay bestie, so this is i-a, one of the little converter gremlins that lives in the BRL-CAD family, and it's genuinely so simple it's almost cute. it turns binary short integers into readable ASCII numbers. that's it. that's the whole vibe ✨

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✨ NAME ✨

i-a — convert binary short integers to ASCII 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

i-a < shorts > ascii

like... that's the entire invocation. redirection in, redirection out, no drama, no flags, no main character options. slay 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea: i-a reads a stream of machine-native 16-bit signed short integers from standard input, and writes each value as a decimal number in ASCII text to standard output — one value per line. literally one number per line, no cap 📝

it takes no options or arguments, periodt. it operates purely as a filter between standard input and standard output. it's giving "I have one job and I do it." 👑

related converters in the group chat include i-d(1) and i-f(1), which turn short integers into binary doubles and floats respectively. so if you need doubles or floats instead of ASCII decimals, go bother them instead 🫶

⚠️ heads up, bestie: this command is deprecated and is scheduled for removal. it prints a deprecation warning on startup — not me being dramatic, that's literally what it does. so maybe don't build your whole pipeline around it, iykyk 😭

🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

Example 1. Inspect the integer samples in a binary file 🔍

i-a < samples.i | head

this decodes the 16-bit integers stored in samples.i and prints the first ten values as human-readable decimal numbers, one per line — which is super useful for spot-checking raw signal or sample data. honestly iconic for when you just want a lil peek at what's inside a binary file 👀💖

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

brlcad(1), i-d(1), i-f(1)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

BRL-CAD Team 💜

💀 COPYRIGHT 💀

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 — like, actually email them, they want to know 🙈

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okay that's the whole page, no crumbs left 💅 this was the BRL-CAD drop, page I-A(1) — and yeah, that's genuinely everything the manual had to say, fr fr 🌸✨🦋