I wanted an 8 bit long shift register in C so I did a typedef to define a bit field like so
typedef struct shift{
unsigned char pb0:1;
unsigned char pb1:1;
unsigned char pb2:1;
unsigned char pb3:1;
unsigned char pb4:1;
unsigned char pb5:1;
unsigned char pb6:1;
unsigned char pb7:1;
}shift;
static shift db;

and then because you cannot do a shift on a bit field I do something like

db.pb7=db.pb6;
bd.pb6=db.pb5;
.....
and so on but there must be an easier way of doing this.
anyone got any clues? oh I didnt use a simple shift=shift<<1 because i wanted to do strange stuff with the individual bits and using bit masks isnt very suitable.