The file position of a stream describes where in the file the stream is currently reading or writing. I/O on the stream advances the file position through the file. In the GNU system, the file position is represented as an integer, which counts the number of bytes from the beginning of the file. See File Position.
During I/O to an ordinary disk file, you can change the file position whenever you wish, so as to read or write any portion of the file. Some other kinds of files may also permit this. Files which support changing the file position are sometimes referred to as random-access files.
You can use the functions in this section to examine or modify the file position indicator associated with a stream. The symbols listed below are declared in the header file stdio.h.
This function returns the current file position of the stream stream.
This function can fail if the stream doesn't support file positioning, or if the file position can't be represented in a
long int
, and possibly for other reasons as well. If a failure occurs, a value of-1
is returned.
The
ftello
function is similar toftell
, except that it returns a value of typeoff_t
. Systems which support this type use it to describe all file positions, unlike the POSIX specification which uses a long int. The two are not necessarily the same size. Therefore, using ftell can lead to problems if the implementation is written on top of a POSIX compliant low-level I/O implementation, and usingftello
is preferable whenever it is available.If this function fails it returns
(off_t) -1
. This can happen due to missing support for file positioning or internal errors. Otherwise the return value is the current file position.The function is an extension defined in the Unix Single Specification version 2.
When the sources are compiled with
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64
on a 32 bit system this function is in factftello64
. I.e., the LFS interface transparently replaces the old interface.
This function is similar to
ftello
with the only difference that the return value is of typeoff64_t
. This also requires that the stream stream was opened using eitherfopen64
,freopen64
, ortmpfile64
since otherwise the underlying file operations to position the file pointer beyond the 2^31 bytes limit might fail.If the sources are compiled with
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64
on a 32 bits machine this function is available under the nameftello
and so transparently replaces the old interface.
The
fseek
function is used to change the file position of the stream stream. The value of whence must be one of the constantsSEEK_SET
,SEEK_CUR
, orSEEK_END
, to indicate whether the offset is relative to the beginning of the file, the current file position, or the end of the file, respectively.This function returns a value of zero if the operation was successful, and a nonzero value to indicate failure. A successful call also clears the end-of-file indicator of stream and discards any characters that were “pushed back” by the use of
ungetc
.
fseek
either flushes any buffered output before setting the file position or else remembers it so it will be written later in its proper place in the file.
This function is similar to
fseek
but it corrects a problem withfseek
in a system with POSIX types. Using a value of typelong int
for the offset is not compatible with POSIX.fseeko
uses the correct typeoff_t
for the offset parameter.For this reason it is a good idea to prefer
ftello
whenever it is available since its functionality is (if different at all) closer the underlying definition.The functionality and return value is the same as for
fseek
.The function is an extension defined in the Unix Single Specification version 2.
When the sources are compiled with
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64
on a 32 bit system this function is in factfseeko64
. I.e., the LFS interface transparently replaces the old interface.
This function is similar to
fseeko
with the only difference that the offset parameter is of typeoff64_t
. This also requires that the stream stream was opened using eitherfopen64
,freopen64
, ortmpfile64
since otherwise the underlying file operations to position the file pointer beyond the 2^31 bytes limit might fail.If the sources are compiled with
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64
on a 32 bits machine this function is available under the namefseeko
and so transparently replaces the old interface.
Portability Note: In non-POSIX systems, ftell
,
ftello
, fseek
and fseeko
might work reliably only
on binary streams. See Binary Streams.
The following symbolic constants are defined for use as the whence
argument to fseek
. They are also used with the lseek
function (see I/O Primitives) and to specify offsets for file locks
(see Control Operations).
This is an integer constant which, when used as the whence argument to the
fseek
orfseeko
function, specifies that the offset provided is relative to the beginning of the file.
This is an integer constant which, when used as the whence argument to the
fseek
orfseeko
function, specifies that the offset provided is relative to the current file position.
This is an integer constant which, when used as the whence argument to the
fseek
orfseeko
function, specifies that the offset provided is relative to the end of the file.
The
rewind
function positions the stream stream at the beginning of the file. It is equivalent to callingfseek
orfseeko
on the stream with an offset argument of0L
and a whence argument ofSEEK_SET
, except that the return value is discarded and the error indicator for the stream is reset.
These three aliases for the ‘SEEK_...’ constants exist for the sake of compatibility with older BSD systems. They are defined in two different header files: fcntl.h and sys/file.h.
L_SET
SEEK_SET
.
L_INCR
SEEK_CUR
.
L_XTND
SEEK_END
.