Are there any alternatives to stat (which is found on most Unix systems) which can determine the file type? The manpage says that a call to stat is expensive, and I need to call it quite often in my app.
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Are there any alternatives to stat (which is found on most Unix systems) which can determine the file type? The manpage says that a call to stat is expensive, and I need to call it quite often in my app.
The alternative is
fstat()if you already have the file open (so you have a file descriptor for it). Orlstat()if you want to find out about symbolic links rather than the file the symlink points to.I think the man page is exaggerating the cost; it is not much worse than any other system call that has to resolve the name of the file into an inode. It is more costly than
getpid(); it is less costly thanopen().