Advice or Tip icon
  • 0xABADBABE (“a bad babe”) is used by Apple as the “Boot Zero Block” magic number.
  • 0xBAADF00D (“bad food”) is used by Microsoft’s LocalAlloc(LMEM_FIXED) to indicate uninitialised allocated heap memory.
  • 0xBADDCAFE (“bad cafe”) is used by ‘watchmalloc’ in OpenSolaris to mark allocated but uninitialized memory.
  • 0xCAFEBABE (“cafe babe”) is used by both Mach-O (“Fat binary” in both 68k and PowerPC) to identify object files and the Java programming language to identify Java bytecode class files.
  • 0xDEADBEEF (“dead beef”) is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS, running on Alpha processes DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T.
  • 0xDEFEC8ED (“defecated”) is the magic number for OpenSolaris core dumps.
  • 0xFEEDFACE (“feed face”) is used as a header for Mach-O binaries, and as an invalid pointer value for ‘watchmalloc’ in OpenSolaris.