Question

I have a file stream in C and I want to know how many lines are in it without iterating through the file. Each line is the same length. How might I go about this?

Answer 1

How about something like this:

• Do a fgets and find out how long one line is

• Find the size of the file using fseek and ftell

  fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
  size = ftell(fp);
  

• Divide by the size of the line

You can also use fseeko and ftello which work with off_t.