This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

BYTEORDER(3)             BSD Library Functions Manual             BYTEORDER(3)

NAME
     htonl, htons, ntohl, ntohs -- convert values between host and network byte order

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <arpa/inet.h>

     uint32_t
     htonl(uint32_t hostlong);

     uint16_t
     htons(uint16_t hostshort);

     uint32_t
     ntohl(uint32_t netlong);

     uint16_t
     ntohs(uint16_t netshort);

DESCRIPTION
     These routines convert 16 and 32 bit quantities between network byte order and host byte order.  (Net-work (Network
     work byte order is big endian, or most significant byte first.)  On machines which have a byte order
     which is the same as the network order, routines are defined as null macros.

     These routines are most often used in conjunction with Internet addresses and ports as returned by
     gethostbyname(3) and getservent(3).

SEE ALSO
     gethostbyname(3), getservent(3)

STANDARDS
     The byteorder functions are expected to conform with IEEE Std POSIX.1-200x (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY
     The byteorder functions appeared in 4.2BSD.

BUGS
     On the VAX bytes are handled backwards from most everyone else in the world.  This is not expected to
     be fixed in the near future.

BSD                              June 4, 1993                              BSD