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Can any one tell me what this statement means:

"Specify the endianness of the object files. This only affects disassembly. This can be useful when disassembling a file format which does not describe endianness information, such as S-records. "

hamb
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    a quick and easy search would answer your question... – Mitch Wheat Jun 15 '12 at 11:25
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    S-records are just a stream of bytes, i.e. unstructured raw data, so there is no implicit endianness. You therefore need to specify endianness separately in a situation where endianness matters. – Paul R Jun 15 '12 at 11:27
  • I doesn't understand what is the meaning of the "This only affects disassembly". I have objdump file and I need to know what the affecting section is??? – hamb Jun 15 '12 at 11:37

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Different environments store numbers in different ways,

Big endian environments store information with the most significant byte first. Little endian environments store information with the least significant byte first.

Nowadays most high level frameworks take care of all this for you, however if your programming at a lower level then this will be important.

Have a peek at the wikipedia entry for it, its really not as bad as some others

old_timer
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John Mitchell
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I don't understand all the question, but endianess is used to describe which way round numbers are stored.

For example, the number 256 is too big for 1 byte so it is represented in 2 bytes as a 1 in one of the bytes and a 0 in the other, representing 1 * 256 plus 0 * units.

The way round these bytes are stored is endianess

Graham
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