[SAC-HELP] dealing with big-endian and little-endian data with SAC and sacswap

[Derek Schutt]

  It's been a while since I worried about this, and I've screwed things 
up a bit.

I requested some data from the DMC, using Standing Order for Data 
(SOD).   It is big-endian.   When I write a sac file on my x86 computer, 
the sac file seems to be in little-endian format (the native format); 
however, when I just write headers to the original sac file, the file 
stays in the big-endian format.

I'd like all my data to be in one format, preferably the native, 
little-endian, format.   I can use sacswap to change format, but it 
seems to work indiscriminantly on files, swapping them even if they are 
in the native format.

So, I was wondering:
     1) If there is any way to make sac write files in the same 
byte-order that the file was read in
     2) is there a more elegant way to work with sacswap, to get it to 
only swap non-native byte order files.   I think the mac version of 
sacswap does do this.

I realize now I should have used the <littleEndian/> tag in my SOD 
request, and it's actually not to hard to retrace my steps and run 
sacswap on the files that need to be swapped.   But I can't help if 
there is a more elegant way to do this...

Thanks,

Derek

-- 
--------------------
Derek Schutt
Assistant Professor
Geosciences Department
309 Natural Resources Building
Campus Delivery 1482
Fort Collins, CO 80525-1482
http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/~schutt/CSU_web/index.htm
970-491-5786