Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!oddjob!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: a couple of random questions
Message-ID: <2636@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 17 Apr 88 20:43:28 GMT
References: <530@vsi.UUCP> <10426@steinmetz.ge.com> <541@vsi.UUCP> <7706@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Distribution: comp
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 19
Summary: the magic cookie explodes

In article <7706@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
writes:
>fseek() to an absolute position only works PORTABLY if the cookie you
>give it is one obtained from ftell().

VAX/VMS C, as always, is an exception.  Open a standard VMS text file
for read, then:

(a) keep reading until you hit end-of-file
(b) do an ftell
(c) do an fseek to end-of-file (with whence=2, offset=0L)
(d) do an ftell again

The two ftells will give different answers.

(I last tried this some months ago.  VMS C evolves nearly as fast as
fruit files do so things might have changed since then.)
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi