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Is there any portable way (on POSIX systems) to determine if a file descriptor is seekable? My thought is to use lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_CUR); and check if the return value is -1, but I’m uncertain if this could give false negatives or false positives. Using fstat and making assumptions about what types of files are seekable/nonseekable does not sound like a good idea. Any other ideas?
The
lseekmethod seems reasonable. It certainly can’t cause a false negative – if it did, something is seriously wrong with the implementation. Also, according to the POSIX spec, it is supposed to fail if the descriptor is a pipe, FIFO or socket, so theoretically you shouldn’t have false positives either. The only remaining question is how well different systems comply with the specs. However, it seems like any other methods, whatever they may be, would definitely be less portable than this.