Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: ANSI draft - seeking to eof
Message-ID: <6192@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 30-Nov-85 20:04:28 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6192
Posted: Sat Nov 30 20:04:28 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 30-Nov-85 20:04:28 EST
References: <5400018@prism.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 13

> 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)?

Only the kludgey one:  read the whole file, and do an ftell() when you hit
the end; then you can seek back there.  Maybe.  Remember that many operating
systems find it very difficult to do a seek in the Unix sense:  their files
simply do not support such an operation in any straightforward way.  Most
programs that want to do non-trivial file manipulation just cannot be
written in such a way as to port to such machines gracefully.  There is no
good way around it.  The minimal X3J11 semantics for seek reflect this.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry