How do you determine the size of a file in C?

Question

How can I figure out the size of a file, in bytes?

#include <stdio.h>

unsigned int fsize(char* file){
  //what goes here?
}

Answer 1

Matt's solution should work, except that it's C++ instead of C, and the initial tell shouldn't be necessary.

unsigned long fsize(char* file)
{
    FILE * f = fopen(file, "r");
    fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END);
    unsigned long len = (unsigned long)ftell(f);
    fclose(f);
    return len;
}

Fixed your brace for you, too. ;)

Update: This isn't really the best solution. It's limited to 4GB files on Windows and it's likely slower than just using a platform-specific call like GetFileSizeEx or stat64.

Answer 2

Don't use int. Files over 2 gigabytes in size are common as dirt these days

Don't use unsigned int. Files over 4 gigabytes in size are common as some slightly-less-common dirt

IIRC the standard library defines off_t as an unsigned 64 bit integer, which is what everyone should be using. We can redefine that to be 128 bits in a few years when we start having 16 exabyte files hanging around.

If you're on windows, you should use GetFileSizeEx - it actually uses a signed 64 bit integer, so they'll start hitting problems with 8 exabyte files. Foolish Microsoft! :-)

Answer 3

Here's a simple and clean function that returns the file size.

long get_file_size(char *path)
{
    FILE *fp;
    /* Open file for reading */
    fp = fopen(path, "r");
    fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
    return ftell(fp); 
}

Answer 4

You're going to need to use a library function to retrieve the details of a file. As C is completely platform independent, you're going to need to let us know what platform / operating system you're developing for!

Answer 5

I used this set of code to find the file length.

//opens a file with a file descriptor
FILE * i_file;
i_file = fopen(source, "r");

//gets a long from the file descriptor for fstat
long f_d = fileno(i_file);
struct stat buffer;
fstat(f_d, &buffer);

//stores file size
long file_length = buffer.st_size;
fclose(i_file);

Answer 6

**Don't do this (why?):

Quoting the C99 standard doc that i found online: "Setting the file position indicator to end-of-file, as with fseek(file, 0, SEEK_END), has undefined behavior for a binary stream (because of possible trailing null characters) or for any stream with state-dependent encoding that does not assuredly end in the initial shift state.**

Change the definition to int so that error messages can be transmitted, and then use fseek() and ftell() to determine the file size.

int fsize(char* file) {
  int size;
  FILE* fh;

  fh = fopen(file, "rb"); //binary mode
  if(fh != NULL){
    if( fseek(fh, 0, SEEK_END) ){
      fclose(fh);
      return -1;
    }

    size = ftell(fh);
    fclose(fh);
    return size;
  }

  return -1; //error
}