What happens when you bit shift beyond the end of a variable?

Question

If you have some variable (on the stack) and you left or right bit shift beyond its end what happens?

i.e.

byte x = 1;
x >> N;

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Answer 1

I think you're confused about what bitshifts do. They are arithmetic operators equivalent to multiplication or division by a power of 2 (modulo some weirdness about how C treats negative numbers). They do not move any bits in memory. The only way the contents of any variable/memory get changed are if you assign the result of the expression back somewhere.

As for what happens when the righthand operand of a bitshift operator is greater than or equal to the width of the type of the lefthand expression, the behavior is undefined.