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This question is in reference to How can I get a file's size in C?
Most answers suggesting the use of the function stat to get the file length also comes with a tag to do error checking.
What kind of error checking do we need here?
Thanks.
Like many Unix/POSIX API functions,
stat(2)returns a negative integer on failure. Unfortunately, this integer is always -1 for stat. Hence, you need to check theerrnoglobal variable (defined in<errno.h>) to see what the exact error was.Ben has listed some of the errors you can run into; the errno codes for these and other errors are listed in the stat manpage.