Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real projects?

Question

Have you ever had to use bit shifting in real programming projects? Most (if not all) high level languages have shift operators in them, but when would you actually need to

Answer 1

I used them a lot in image compression/decompression, where the bits in a bitmap were compressed. Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding the things being compressed consist of various numbers of bits (they're not all byte-aligned), and therefore you need to bit-shift them when you encode or decode them.