Finding if the system is little endian or big endian with perl

Question

Is there an option to find if my system is little endian byte order or big endian byte order using Perl?

Answer 1

perl -MConfig -e 'print "$Config{byteorder}\n";'

See Perl documentation.

If the first byte of the output string is 1, you can assume (with moderate safety) that it is little-endian. If it is 4 or 8, you can assume big-endian.

Answer 2

I guess you could do:

$big_endian = pack("L", 1) eq pack("N", 1);

This might fail if your system has a nonstandard (neither big-endian nor little-endian) byte ordering (eg PDP-11).