Looking at my recent projects, bitwise stuff seems to crop up when I'm dealing with binary data generated by someone else. Some of that is SmartNet trunking da

Looking at my recent projects, bitwise stuff seems to crop up when I'm dealing with binary data generated by someone else. Some of that is SmartNet trunking data - lots of weird bit-mangling happens in there. Sometimes it shows up when dealing with raw Ethernet frames. I also apparently used it to mask off all but the bottom 8 bits when creating some temporary hex identifiers with data from /dev/[u]random. Otherwise, I'm ORing some flags together for some library call: libcurl, libxml2, plus bits of the C library like fcntl and open. Oh, and I guess I frob some termios bits sometimes to enable or disable echo for reading a password. It doesn't come up often. When it does, it gets hidden down in some low-level utility function and then I build on top of that with something which doesn't try to be clever.