On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:42:53PM -0700, cgd@broadcom.com wrote:
> At Sat, 3 May 2003 03:56:27 +0000 (UTC), "Simon Burge" wrote:
> > I've been annoyed at this but never enough to dig in and fix it.  You
> > should see that little-endian binaries reported by file as "LSB" and
> > big-endian as "MSB".  Not as useful as "little endian" or "big endian",
> > but it can tell the difference.
> 
> And before anybody gets any Great Ideas:

smells like some PRs from yesteryear.  (4939 and 6545) you'll notice
file(1) also reports "invalid byte order."  it's something to do with the
toolchain and the ELF standard not quite matching but legacy forcing a
defacto standard.

it seems to have been adjusted in newer versions of NetBSD:

1.5.2: /home/agrier/hello_g: ELF 32-bit LSB mips-1 executable, MIPS R3000_LE, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

1.6.1: /home/agrier/hello_g: ELF 32-bit LSB MIPS-I executable, MIPS, version 1 (SYSV), for NetBSD, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com
      "It's not fast, but why not?"  --  John Klos on VAX dnet client
  "because it needlessly contributes to global warming?"  --  Paul Vixie