[From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 ‘SWAp
Byte’ instruction, as immortalized in the
dd1
option conv=swab
(see
dd)]
1. vt. To solve the NUXI problem by swapping bytes in a file
2. n. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also big-endian, little-endian, middle-endian, bytesexual.