Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Possible Problems Exchanging Data Between HP-UX and PCs
Chapter 2 133
• Carriage returns with no line feeds (each line of text overwrites the
previous line). All lines in the file are printed on the same line on the
screen.
If you see any of the above symptoms, the solution is to edit the offending
file using an editor or word processor and change the end-of-line
characters in your ASCII file to what your operating system is expecting
(see Table 2-10, “Operating System End-of-Line Characters,” on
page 132).
The Endian Difference Problem
Though you are less likely to encounter this problem than the end-of-line
character problem, and though many utilities and programs are written
to automatically account for differences in the endian types of varying
machines, you might encounter files that appear to be corrupt on one
architecture yet appear to be fine on another. This will most likely occur
when sharing a file system between computers of differing endian
architectures (such as when using NFS mounts, or Network Operating
Systems such as Novell’
s NetWare).
What is Endian?
The term “endian” refers to the order in which bytes in a computer word
are numbered. When certain applications write data to a file, they record
the bytes of the word in numerical order. Although nearly all computers
view a word of memory as having the most significant bit in the left-most
position, and the least significant bit in the right-most position, computer
architectures vary on whether they number the bytes of a word from left
to right, or from right to left.
Big Endian
Architectures
Architectures that number the bytes of a word from left to right (byte 0
represents the left-most eight bits of the word) are called “big endian”
architectures. Apple Macintosh computers, and many Hewlett-Packard
PA-RISC computers are examples of big endian machines.