Subj : Re: newbie question [C language]
To   : comp.programming
From : websnarf
Date : Fri Jul 01 2005 08:34 pm

Fred_NacH wrote:
> I was wondering, how to retrieve the size/length of a file by only using
> the ansi functions...

The C language has a problem where the size of file that can be defined
by the platform can exceed the largest integer size that the language
itself supports.  This is clearly a serious issue for 32-bit OSes that
support 64 bit files.  So using functions like ftell() or even
(f)stat() is not really guaranteed to work.  In fact I have no idea
what a programmer should expect ftell() to ever tell them.  On Windows
systems, int is usually defined as 32-bits, and ftell() returns an int,
however clearly the OS supports 64-bit files.

Your system may support a function like _fstati64(), or some other
similar function which is more likely to give you want you are looking
for.  On a couple Windows compilers I use, _fstati64() outputs to a
structure which is syntactically equivalent to the posix structure
struct stat, though it may contain additional reserved entries and will
define st_size as __int64.  Of course the size of a "directory" or
abstract file (such as "con") does really make any sense, but you can
use the st_mode entry to figure out whether or not you have accessed an
ordinary file or not.

-- 
Paul Hsieh
http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
http://bstring.sf.net/

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