title: Byte order reversed in the Terminal
body: <p>I am running a C program whose exit status is captured by a Python script using the os.system call on a Linux/little-endian machine.</p>
  
  <pre><code>retval=os.system("./cprogexe")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If the exit status is 1, the python variable retval is 256 (reverse byte order). Why is this happening if python does indeed follow the local CPU's byte ordering scheme?</p>