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 14, FreeBSD 7.2, AIX 7.1, Solaris 9, mingw64.
On some platforms, stat(".",buf) and stat("./",buf) give different results: mingw, MSVC 14.
On mingw, the st_mode field of stat("NUL",buf) is bogus, suggesting that NUL is a regular file.
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.
On Windows platforms (excluding Cygwin), a different name has to be used for the null device, namely "NUL" instead of "/dev/null".

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.
This function sets st_ino only to the low-order 32 bits of the inode number of a socket or pipe, which thus can disagree with the st_ino obtained by fstat: macOS 14.
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).