A system and method for byte swapping file access data structures is provided. A file server, upon receipt of a file access data structure, byte swaps the header of the data structure and passes the data structure to the appropriate file access system process to process the operation defined by the data structure. The file access system process calls a byte swapping engine to perform byte swapping on individual elements of the data structure as needed. The byte swapping engine utilizes a descriptor look up table to determine what action should be performed on each element of a data structure.