PS: Can anyone recommend a good reference to the POSIX standard?
There's nothing like having the standard itself on your reference
shelf. Call the IEEE at 800-678-IEEE. I have Std 1003.1b-1993, but I
think you should now order Std 1003.1c-1995. (1003.1b is 1003.1-1990
plus realtime extensions. 1003.1c is 1003.1b plus threads.)
I'm pleased to see you looking at POSIX.1. All Unix systems I've seen
recently support it, so it seems to be the right interface to code to.
(And for those that don't, you can feel pretty good about pointing the
finger back at them to fix it.)
Now, for the functions under discussion here...
ISO C specifies the offset of fseek and the return value of ftell
to be "long int".
The POSIX functions (e.g., lseek, ftruncate) use off_t instead of
long. Most implementations make this a long, but it is wrong to
assume this.
< Stephen