When writing procedures using FTP operations, one has the option of sending the information in either Binary mode or ASCII mode. When sending from a Power system to an Intell system, ASCII handles how the data is supposed to be represented, not bit by bit. However, I am curious to know how does FTP handle endianess (where Intel uses little endian and Power Systems use big Endian) between hosts?
When opening a text file transfered in binary, it appears that the much of the ASCII representation is presevered with the exception of missing carraige return control characters that Microsoft uses to print a new line in a text document. With that being said, it would appear that most FTP API’s handle the endianess correction between hosts. But with that said, is it truly a bit for bit tansfer or byte for byte transfer? Is the FTP API or the OS handling the the conversion?
Endianness describes how computers combine bytes to form multi-byte values (eg, a 4-byte integer).
FTP deals with individual bytes, not multi-byte values.
Endianness is totally irrelevant.