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Although this code is likely to perform the division correctly, it is not guaranteed to. If x has a signed type and a negative value, the operation is implementation-defined and can be implemented as either an arithmetic shift or a logical shift. In the event of a logical shift, if the integer is represented in either one's complement or two's complement form, the most significant bit (which controls the sign in a different way for both representations) will be set to zero. This will cause a once negative number to become a possibly very large, positive number. For more details, see INT13-AC. Use bitwise operators only on unsigned operands.

For example, if the internal representation of x is 0xFFFF FFCE (two's complement), an arithmetic shift results in 0xFFFF FFF3 (-13 in two's complement), while a logical shift results in 0x3FFF FFF3 (1 073 741 811 in two's complement).

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\[[ISO/IEC 9899:1999|AA. C References#ISO/IEC 9899-1999]\] Section 6.2.6.2, "Integer types"
\[[ISO/IEC PDTR 24772|AA. C References#ISO/IEC PDTR 24772]\] "STR Bit Representations"
\[[MISRA 04|AA. C References#MISRA 04]\] Rules 6.4 and 6.5
\[[Steele 77|AA. C References#Steele 77]\]

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INT13-A. Use bitwise operators only on unsigned operandsImage Added      04. Integers (INT)       INT15-A. Use intmax_t or uintmax_t for formatted IO on programmer-defined integer types