Basic question, but I expected this struct to occupy 13 bytes of space (1 for the char, 12 for the 3 unsigned ints). Instead, sizeof(ESPR_REL_HEADER) gives me 16 bytes.

typedef struct {
  unsigned char version;
  unsigned int  root_node_num;
  unsigned int  node_size;
  unsigned int  node_count;
} ESPR_REL_HEADER;

What I'm trying to do is initialize this struct with some values and write the data it contains (the raw bytes) to the start of a file, so that when I open this file I later I can reconstruct this struct and gain some meta data about what the rest of the file contains.

I'm initializing the struct and writing it to the file like this:

int esprime_write_btree_header(FILE * fp, unsigned int node_size) {
  ESPR_REL_HEADER header = {
    .version       = 1,
    .root_node_num = 0,
    .node_size     = node_size,
    .node_count    = 1
  };

  return fwrite(&header, sizeof(ESPR_REL_HEADER), 1, fp);
}

Where node_size is currently 4 while I experiment.

The file contains the following data after I write the struct to it:

-bash$  hexdump test.dat
0000000 01 bf f9 8b 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 01 00 00 00
0000010

I expect it to actually contain:

-bash$  hexdump test.dat
0000000 01 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 01 00 00 00
0000010

Excuse the newbiness. I am trying to learn :) How do I efficiently write just the data components of my struct to a file?