How can I get a file's size in C? [duplicate]

Answer 1

I ended up just making a short and sweet fsize function(note, no error checking)

int fsize(FILE *fp){
    int prev=ftell(fp);
    fseek(fp, 0L, SEEK_END);
    int sz=ftell(fp);
    fseek(fp,prev,SEEK_SET); //go back to where we were
    return sz;
}

It's kind of silly that the standard C library doesn't have such a function, but I can see why it'd be difficult as not every "file" has a size(for instance /dev/null)

Answer 2

Have you considered not computing the file size and just growing the array if necessary? Here's an example (with error checking ommitted):

#define CHUNK 1024

/* Read the contents of a file into a buffer.  Return the size of the file 
 * and set buf to point to a buffer allocated with malloc that contains  
 * the file contents.
 */
int read_file(FILE *fp, char **buf) 
{
  int n, np;
  char *b, *b2;

  n = CHUNK;
  np = n;
  b = malloc(sizeof(char)*n);
  while ((r = fread(b, sizeof(char), CHUNK, fp)) > 0) {
    n += r;
    if (np - n < CHUNK) { 
      np *= 2;                      // buffer is too small, the next read could overflow!
      b2 = malloc(np*sizeof(char));
      memcpy(b2, b, n * sizeof(char));
      free(b);
      b = b2;
    }
  }
  *buf = b;
  return n;
}

This has the advantage of working even for streams in which it is impossible to get the file size (like stdin).