ftp and endianism

[Mme Jonnaert]

hi
we have to tranfer file between an hp/ux 11i itanium machine and a tru64 alpha server using ftp
Will we have problem with big to little endian representation?
thanks for your answers

tmj

[Pete Randall]

Using binary mode should eliminate the any possible problems.


Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

While binary transfer will preserve the exact byte order, in this case this is probably not a good thing. Tru64 is Little-Endian and HP-UX (either on PA-RISC or Itanium) is Big-Endian -- although the Itanium can run in either. You are really going to have to adopt a data abstraction layer such as XDR (or simply convert everything to text) if this is more than a one-shot deal.

[Pete Randall]

Thanks (again), Clay!


Pete

[Mark Greene_1]

You can try to use the swab option of dd to do the byte-swapping prior to ftp'ing:

dd if=file_name of=temp_file_name conv=swab


and then ftp the temp_file_name and see what you get.

mark

[rick jones]

Whether you will have problems probably depends on what is in the file.