UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear Friends,

I have one question in my mind. That question is

"how to detect whether the system is little endiean or big endian"

Processing the bit position is the difference between this endians.
But I could not understand how to find the pariticular sytem works acccording to this pattern.

Advance Thanks for u All u r Answers. )

Thanks and Regards,
Nirmal Babu

hi Nirmal,
There is one program in book titled network programming in unix by
Richard Stevens. See if you can that book. I had used the program form that book.

I think you can easily check it using a C code where you create a union made of an integer and a char array that matches the integer size (4 bytes in x86, for example).

Then you assign the number 1 to the union's integer.
Checking the value of the first element of the array, and looking wether it's zero or one, you can determine system's endianess (i think it will be 1 in little endian).

Hope this helps

Salut

Dear Reddymails and shesatmine,


Thank U Reddymails for the suggestion of the Unix book. It was very helpful to me. Thanks a lot.

Thank U shesatmine, i have tried. i was able to get get the solution.

Thanks and Regards,
Nirmal Babu