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LSEEK(2) BSD System Calls Manual LSEEK(2) NAME lseek -- reposition read/write file offset LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include <unistd.h> off_t lseek(int fildes, off_t offset, int whence); DESCRIPTION The lseek() system call repositions the offset of the file descriptor fildes to the argument offset according to the directive whence. The ar- gument fildes must be an open file descriptor. The lseek() system call repositions the file position pointer associated with the file descriptor fildes as follows: If whence is SEEK_SET, the offset is set to offset bytes. If whence is SEEK_CUR, the offset is set to its current location plus offset bytes. If whence is SEEK_END, the offset is set to the size of the file plus offset bytes. If whence is SEEK_HOLE, the offset is set to the start of the next hole greater than or equal to the supplied offset. The definition of a hole is provided below. If whence is SEEK_DATA, the offset is set to the start of the next non-hole file region greater than or equal to the supplied offset. The lseek() system call allows the file offset to be set beyond the end of the existing end-of-file of the file. If data is later written at this point, subsequent reads of the data in the gap return bytes of zeros (until data is actually written into the gap). Some devices are incapable of seeking. The value of the pointer associ- ated with such a device is undefined. A "hole" is defined as a contiguous range of bytes in a file, all having the value of zero, but not all zeros in a file are guaranteed to be rep- resented as holes returned with SEEK_HOLE. File systems are allowed to expose ranges of zeros with SEEK_HOLE, but not required to. Applications can use SEEK_HOLE to optimise their behavior for ranges of zeros, but must not depend on it to find all such ranges in a file. Each file is presented as having a zero-size virtual hole at the very end of the file. The existence of a hole at the end of every data region allows for easy programming and also provides compatibility to the original implementa- tion in Solaris. It also causes the current file size (i.e., end-of-file offset) to be returned to indicate that there are no more holes past the supplied offset. Applications should use fpathconf(_PC_MIN_HOLE_SIZE) or pathconf(_PC_MIN_HOLE_SIZE) to determine if a file system supports SEEK_HOLE. See pathconf(2). For file systems that do not supply information about holes, the file will be represented as one entire data region. RETURN VALUES Upon successful completion, lseek() returns the resulting offset location as measured in bytes from the beginning of the file. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error. ERRORS The lseek() system call will fail and the file position pointer will re- main unchanged if: [EBADF] The fildes argument is not an open file descriptor. [EINVAL] The whence argument is not a proper value or the re- sulting file offset would be negative for a non-char- acter special file. [ENXIO] For SEEK_DATA, there are no more data regions past the supplied offset. Due to existence of the hole at the end of the file, for SEEK_HOLE this error is only re- turned when the offset already points to the end-of- file position. [EOVERFLOW] The resulting file offset would be a value which can- not be represented correctly in an object of type off_t. [ESPIPE] The fildes argument is associated with a pipe, socket, or FIFO. SEE ALSO dup(2), open(2), pathconf(2) STANDARDS The lseek() system call is expected to conform to ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 ("POSIX.1"). HISTORY The lseek() function appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX. BUGS This document's use of whence is incorrect English, but is maintained for historical reasons. BSD February 18, 2016 BSD
NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUES | ERRORS | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS | HISTORY | BUGS
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