14.9.2 Reading the Attributes of a File To examine the attributes of files, use the functions stat, fstat and lstat. They return the attribute information in a struct stat object. All three functions are declared in the header file sys/stat.h.
— Function: int
stat (const char *filename, struct stat *buf)
The stat function returns information about the attributes of the file named by filename in the structure pointed to by buf.
If filename is the name of a symbolic link, the attributes you get describe the file that the link points to. If the link points to a nonexistent file name, then stat fails reporting a nonexistent file.
The return value is 0 if the operation is successful, or -1 on failure. In addition to the usual file name errors (see
File Name Errors, the following errno error conditions are defined for this function:
ENOENTThe file named by filename doesn't exist. When the sources are compiled with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64 this function is in fact stat64 since the LFS interface transparently replaces the normal implementation.
— Function: int
stat64 (const char *filename, struct stat64 *buf)
This function is similar to stat but it is also able to work on files larger then 2^31 bytes on 32-bit systems. To be able to do this the result is stored in a variable of type struct stat64 to which buf must point.
When the sources are compiled with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64 this function is available under the name stat and so transparently replaces the interface for small files on 32-bit