What is the use of .byte assembler directive in gnu assembly?

Question

While going through some C code having inline assembly I came across the .byte (with a Dot at the beginning) directive.

On checking the assembly reference on web I f

Answer 1

Here's an example with inline assembly:

#include 
void main() {
   int dst;
   // .byte 0xb8 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 = mov $1, %%eax
   asm (".byte 0xb8, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00\n\t"
    "mov %%eax, %0"
    : "=r" (dst)
    : : "eax"  // tell the compiler we clobber eax
   );
   printf ("dst value : %d\n", dst);
return;
}

(See compiler asm output and also disassembly of the final binary on the Godbolt compiler explorer.)

You can replace .byte 0xb8, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00 with mov $1, %%eax the run result will be the same. This indicated that it can be a byte which can represent some instruction eg- move or others.