Re: Behavior of lseek() on a fd opened with 'RDONLY' flag, when seeking goes beyond file size.

[David Newall <davidn@davidnewall.com>]

palani saravanan wrote:
>    In linux, I see that it just goes beyond the file size and returns the resulting offset.
>    For example, 'rc = lseek(fd, 4L, SEEK_END);' on a file which has 5 byte contents,
>    it returns rc as 9.
>   

Sounds right.  It's documented that way, too:

       "The lseek() function allows the file offset to be set beyond the
end of  the  file  (but  this
       does  not  change  the  size of the file)."
           -- man 2 lseek
>    I expect that it would return size of the file, i.e.) 5.
>   

Only if you pass (0,SEEK_END).

>    Does the file pointer internally really points to the new location.?
>   

So the documentation promises.