C Program To Determine Byte Order (Endianness)

Recently I needed to needed to check the endianness of a machine. I assumed the machine was Little Indian but wanted to make sure, thus this C code snippet. It’s important to understand that endian.h is not cross-platform, and exist only on Linux machines. There are standard byte order functions you can use if you are on Windows to figure this stuff out. Perhaps I will show an example of that later.

ByteOrder.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <endian.h>

int main (void)
{
#if BYTE_ORDER == LITTLE_ENDIAN
printf("system is little Endian \n");
#elif BYTE_ORDER == BIG_ENDIAN
printf("system is big Endian \n");
#else
printf("whats going on? \n");
#endif

return 0;
}