How do you determine the size of a file in C?

Question

How can I figure out the size of a file, in bytes?

#include 

unsigned int fsize(char* file){
  //what goes here?
}

Answer 1

Based on NilObject's code:

#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

off_t fsize(const char *filename) {
    struct stat st; 

    if (stat(filename, &st) == 0)
        return st.st_size;

    return -1; 
}

Changes:

• Made the filename argument a const char.
• Corrected the struct stat definition, which was missing the variable name.
• Returns -1 on error instead of 0, which would be ambiguous for an empty file. off_t is a signed type so this is possible.

If you want fsize() to print a message on error, you can use this:

#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>

off_t fsize(const char *filename) {
    struct stat st;

    if (stat(filename, &st) == 0)
        return st.st_size;

    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot determine size of %s: %s\n",
            filename, strerror(errno));

    return -1;
}

On 32-bit systems you should compile this with the option -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64, otherwise off_t will only hold values up to 2 GB. See the "Using LFS" section of Large File Support in Linux for details.

Answer 2

**Don't do this (why?):

Quoting the C99 standard doc that i found online: "Setting the file position indicator to end-of-file, as with fseek(file, 0, SEEK_END), has undefined behavior for a binary stream (because of possible trailing null characters) or for any stream with state-dependent encoding that does not assuredly end in the initial shift state.**

Change the definition to int so that error messages can be transmitted, and then use fseek() and ftell() to determine the file size.

int fsize(char* file) {
  int size;
  FILE* fh;

  fh = fopen(file, "rb"); //binary mode
  if(fh != NULL){
    if( fseek(fh, 0, SEEK_END) ){
      fclose(fh);
      return -1;
    }

    size = ftell(fh);
    fclose(fh);
    return size;
  }

  return -1; //error
}