ANSI draft - seeking to eof
Doug Gwyn <gwyn>
gwyn at brl-tgr.ARPA
Sat Nov 30 14:29:00 AEST 1985
> The latest (November 11) draft from X3J11 says this about fseek():
>
> int fseek (FILE *stream, long offset, int ptrname)
>
> A binary stream need not meaningfully support fseek
> calls with a ptrname value of SEEK_END.
>
> For a text stream, either offset must be zero, or
> offset must be a value returned by an earlier call
> to ftell on the same stream and ptrname must be
> SEEK_SET.
> [X3J11/85-138, page 109]
>
> Does this really mean that there's no guaranteed way to seek to the end of
> either a text or a binary stream in ANSI C (when such a beast exists)?
It says you can seek to the end of a text stream but not a binary
stream. This is interesting; one wonders what systems they had
in mind that can do the one but not the other.
By the way, UNIX I/O is meant to qualify as "text stream". There
was a problem in the wording that we turned up in P1003 (apparently
would require all UNIX files to end with a newline byte); I don't
know whether X3J11 has fixed this by now, but I sure hope so.
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