Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!civet.ukc.ac.uk!mtr
From: mtr@ukc.ac.uk (M.T.Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: access()
Message-ID: <240@civet.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 7 Feb 91 11:05:29 GMT
References: <15051@smoke.brl.mil> <3345@unisoft.UUCP> <15103@smoke.brl.mil>
Reply-To: mtr@ukc.ac.uk (M.T.Russell)
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Lines: 10

In article <15103@smoke.brl.mil> gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>                                  The safest way to test for file
>existence (on UNIX) is to stat() the presumed pathname and see if
>it succeeds.

On BSD systems lstat() is often better, as stat() will return
a wrong negative result for a symbolic link that points to a
non-existent file.

Mark