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From: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: binary data files
Summary: know thy DOS
Message-ID: <14301@bfmny0.UUCP>
Date: 3 May 89 14:50:58 GMT
References: <10946@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <12546@ut-emx.UUCP> <8758@csli.Stanford.EDU> <11021@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff)
Organization: ^
Lines: 19

In article <11021@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes:
>Actually, this illustrates another thing it's worth shying away
>from if you can.  The assumption that you can determine, without
>actually reading them, exactly how many characters a file
>contains, can get you in to trouble, although of course it's a
>perfectly valid assumption on Unix systems.  Not so on VMS and
>MS-DOS and doubtless other lesser systems -- stat() or the
 ^^^^^^
>equivalent may only give you an approximation.

MS-DOS has exact filesizes in bytes, and a standard OS call to retrieve
a file's size in bytes.  The poster may have been thinking of CP/M,
but CP/M is not MS-DOS.



-- 
Tom Neff				UUCP:     ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
    "Truisms aren't everything."	Internet: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET