4 Responses to how to know your system is little endian or big endian………..?

1. Mandeesh Singh says:

   October 4, 2011 at 1:05 am

   It’s entirely dependent on the Processor architecture.
   Commonly used Examples : -
   Big Endian : Motorola 6800, IBM Power
   Little Endian :x86, x86-64, 8051 etc
   Well just to share more. There’s another category that is : Bi-Endian which can behave as either of the two categories mentioned above. Most Important example is ARM, Power PC or MIPS.

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   • spatlou says:

     October 4, 2011 at 12:11 pm

     ARM processors could work in both modes either little and big endian.
     In the ARM9TDMI, the “BIGEND” can be set (0 or 1) for instruction and data fetches…but only affect 16bit or 8bit fetches, while leaving the 32-bit word access unaffected.

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2. Kuldeep Dhanotia says:

   October 5, 2011 at 2:37 pm

   Thaks to every one but
   i want the c program that show the system architecture is little or big endian

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3. kamran says:

   October 7, 2011 at 11:46 am

   For little endian lower-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address and for big endian higher-order byte is stored at lowest address.

   #include
   #define BIG_ENDIAN 0
   #define LITTLE_ENDIAN 1

   int main()
   {
   int value;
   value = endian();
   if (value == 1)
   printf(“Little endian\n”);
   else
   printf(“big endian\n”);
   return 0;
   }

   int endian() {
   short int word = 0×0001;
   char *byte = (char *) &word;
   return (byte[0] ? LITTLE_ENDIAN : BIG_ENDIAN);
   }

   Reply