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swab(3)                     Library Functions Manual                    swab(3)

NAME
       swab - swap adjacent bytes

LIBRARY
       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
       #define _XOPEN_SOURCE       /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
       #include <unistd.h>

       void swab(const void from[restrict .n], void to[restrict .n],
                 ssize_t n);

DESCRIPTION
       The  swab() function copies n bytes from the array pointed to by from to
       the array pointed to by to, exchanging  adjacent  even  and  odd  bytes.
       This  function  is used to exchange data between machines that have dif-
       ferent low/high byte ordering.

       This function does nothing when n is negative.  When n is  positive  and
       odd,  it handles n-1 bytes as above, and does something unspecified with
       the last byte.  (In other words, n should be even.)

RETURN VALUE
       The swab() function returns no value.

ATTRIBUTES
       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).
       ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │ Interface                                  Attribute     Value   │
       ├────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │ swab()                                     │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

STANDARDS
       POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY
       POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD.

SEE ALSO
       bstring(3)

Linux man-pages 6.9.1              2024-05-02                           swab(3)

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