The GNU C Library - Reading Attributes

Reading the Attributes of a File

To examine the attributes of files, use the functions stat , fstat and lstat . They return the attribute information in a struct stat object. All three functions are declared in the header file `sys/stat.h'.

Function int stat (const char *filename, struct stat *buf)

The stat function returns information about the attributes of the file named by filename in the structure pointed at by buf.

If filename is the name of a symbolic link, the attributes you get describe the file that the link points to. If the link points to a nonexistent file name, then stat fails, reporting a nonexistent file.

The return value is 0 if the operation is successful, and -1 on failure. In addition to the usual file name syntax errors (see File Name Errors, the following errno error conditions are defined for this function:

ENOENT

The file named by filename doesn't exist.

Function int fstat (int filedes, struct stat *buf)

The fstat function is like stat , except that it takes an open file descriptor as an argument instead of a file name. See Low-Level I/O.

Like stat , fstat returns 0 on success and -1 on failure. The following errno error conditions are defined for fstat :

EBADF

The filedes argument is not a valid file descriptor.

Function int lstat (const char *filename, struct stat *buf)

The lstat function is like stat , except that it does not follow symbolic links. If filename is the name of a symbolic link, lstat returns information about the link itself; otherwise, lstat works like stat . See Symbolic Links.