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You can do a lot with one line of Perl. For example, I wanted to change the default root device of a kernel image -- the way rdev(8) does -- to block device major 240 minor 0 (which is /dev/cloop if you use the cloop driver). So I found how to do this with dd, instead of rdev, and then it turned out that it could all be done this way:
perl -e 'open V,"+<bzImage";seek V,508,0;print V "\0\360"'
Now that's concise.
