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Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/lib/libstat.tex')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/lib/libstat.tex | 13 |
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/lib/libstat.tex b/Doc/lib/libstat.tex index 7d19a68..5243a65 100644 --- a/Doc/lib/libstat.tex +++ b/Doc/lib/libstat.tex @@ -97,7 +97,8 @@ Group id of the owner. \end{datadesc} \begin{datadesc}{ST_SIZE} -File size in bytes. +Size in bytes of a plain file; amount of data waiting on some special +files. \end{datadesc} \begin{datadesc}{ST_ATIME} @@ -112,6 +113,16 @@ Time of last modification. Time of last status change (see manual pages for details). \end{datadesc} +The interpretation of ``file size'' changes according to the file +type. For plain files this is the size of the file in bytes. For +FIFOs and sockets under most Unixes (including Linux in particular), +the ``size'' is the number of bytes waiting to be read at the time of +the stat(2)/fstat(2)/lstat(2) call; this can sometimes be useful, +especially for polling one of these special files after a non-blocking +open. The meaning of the size field for other character and block +devices varies more, depending on the local implementation of the +underlying system call. + Example: \begin{verbatim} |