On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Judah Milgram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  Is the reason hexdump gets it right even though I haven't told it whether
>  my machine is big or little endianed, is it that the underlying call to
>  printf takes care of it, and that's part of the libc built for that
>  particular machine?

Well, the processor takes care of it, really -- it puts those two
bytes in memory, then looks at them as a 16-bit integer, then converts
that quantity to a hex string.

Hexdump, and everything on your system, was compiled for your
particular architecture, and doesn't need to be told anything about
endianness.  It could have a feature that would *ignore* the system's
endianness and print things in an endianness that you specify.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com

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