endians

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>Quoting Dennis Malen (Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:58:43 -0500):
>
>> Jim,
>>
>> I ran it as a shell script. I don't have a C Compiler on the RISC box.
>[...]
>
>It's a C program, not a shell script.  The lack of a C compiler does
>not imply that C source code can be run as a shell script instead.
>
>If it's a RISC box, with the same CPU series as the RS/6000's RISC
>processor, then it's big-endian.

An easy way to determine the endianness of a machine that has a
reasonably current version of python is with a script like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
print sys.byteorder

Perl has something similar, but less intuitive as it seems backwards
for little endian machines:

You can get this from the command line with ``perl -V:byteorder``
which returns byteorder='1234'; on a little-endian machine.

Bill
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