Question

This question appeared when I recently opened a rather old driver for my raid device. To be able to compile the driver for a Linux system, I started to investigate on all those errors I got on output. And I came across this kind of syntax used in the driver sources:

struct file_operations t3_fops = {
        owner:                  THIS_MODULE,
        ioctl:                  ft_ioctl,
        fasync:                 ft_fasync,
        open:                   ft_open,
        release:                ft_release
};

So guys, could you help me to understand what does “:” mean? Is this C syntax at all? I know there is a bit field definition, but this looks rather different to me.

Answer 1

This syntax for initializing structure members is called a designated initializer. The : is older GCC-specific syntax. This is documented in the GCC manual.