CHAPTER
14

Number Base Conversions

On many occasions in computer science you need to convert numbers between different number bases. For example, you may need to translate a hexadecimal number into an octal representation, or if you are a software developer you may want to license the software you create for a specific machine. One way of creating a machine-specific license key is to use the IP address of the machine to create a hexadecimal character string, which will allow the software to execute only on that specific machine. The first example here is a common occurrence, but the latter one is a little more obscure.

In this chapter we are going to present some number base conversion techniques and also show how to create a shell script that produces a license key, as in our second example. Converting between number bases is very straightforward, and we are going to go through each step. Before we can write a shell script we need the correct command syntax. In this case we add setting up the proper environment for the system to do all of the hard work automatically.