stat (GNU Gnulib)

Gnulib module: stat

Portability problems fixed by Gnulib:

On platforms where off_t is a 32-bit type, stat may not correctly report the size of files or block devices 2 GiB and larger. See Large File Support.
On Linux/x86 and Linux/x86_64, applications compiled in 32-bit mode cannot access files that happen to have a 64-bit inode number. This can occur with file systems such as XFS (typically on large disks) and NFS. See Large File Support.
The st_atime, st_ctime, st_mtime fields are affected by the current time zone and by the DST flag of the current time zone on some platforms: mingw, MSVC 14 (when the environment variable TZ is set).
On MSVC 14, this function fails with error ENOENT on files such as ‘C:\pagefile.sys’ and on directories such as ‘C:\System Volume Information’.
On some platforms, stat("link-to-file/",buf) succeeds instead of failing with ENOTDIR. macOS 11.1, FreeBSD 7.2, AIX 7.1, Solaris 9, mingw64.
On some platforms, stat(".",buf) and stat("./",buf) give different results: mingw, MSVC 14.
On macOS 12.6, when this function yields a timestamp with a nonpositive tv_sec value, tv_nsec might be in the range -999999999..-1, representing a negative nanoseconds offset from tv_sec. Solaris 11.4 is similar, except that tv_sec might also be -1000000000.

Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:

See sys/stat.h, for general portability problems with struct stat.
Cygwin’s stat function sometimes sets errno to EACCES when ENOENT would be more appropriate.
Because of the definition of struct stat, it is not possible to portably replace stat via an object-like macro. Therefore, expressions such as (islnk ? lstat : stat) (name, buf) are not portable, and should instead be written islnk ? lstat (name, buf) : stat (name, buf).