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

On Unix-like systems, you can use POSIX system calls: stat on a path, or fstat on an already-open file descriptor (POSIX man page, Linux man page).
(Get a file descriptor from open(2), or fileno(FILE*) on a stdio stream).

Based on NilObject's code:

#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

off_t fsize(const char *filename) {
    struct stat st; 

    if (stat(filename, &st) == 0)
        return st.st_size;

    return -1; 
}

Changes:

• Made the filename argument a const char.
• Corrected the struct stat definition, which was missing the variable name.
• Returns -1 on error instead of 0, which would be ambiguous for an empty file. off_t is a signed type so this is possible.

If you want fsize() to print a message on error, you can use this:

#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>

off_t fsize(const char *filename) {
    struct stat st;

    if (stat(filename, &st) == 0)
        return st.st_size;

    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot determine size of %s: %s\n",
            filename, strerror(errno));

    return -1;
}

On 32-bit systems you should compile this with the option -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64, otherwise off_t will only hold values up to 2 GB. See the "Using LFS" section of Large File Support in Linux for details.

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

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 4

**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
}

Answer 5

POSIX

The POSIX standard has its own method to get file size.
Include the sys/stat.h header to use the function.

Synopsis

• Get file statistics using stat(3).
• Obtain the st_size property.

Examples

Note: It limits the size to 4GB. If not Fat32 filesystem then use the 64bit version!

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    struct stat info;
    stat(argv[1], &info);

    // 'st' is an acronym of 'stat'
    printf("%s: size=%ld\n", argv[1], info.st_size);
}

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    struct stat64 info;
    stat64(argv[1], &info);

    // 'st' is an acronym of 'stat'
    printf("%s: size=%ld\n", argv[1], info.st_size);
}

ANSI C (standard)

The ANSI C doesn't directly provides the way to determine the length of the file.
We'll have to use our mind. For now, we'll use the seek approach!

Synopsis

• Seek the file to the end using fseek(3).
• Get the current position using ftell(3).

Example

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    FILE* fp = fopen(argv[1]);
    int f_size;

    fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
    f_size = ftell(fp);
    rewind(fp); // to back to start again

    printf("%s: size=%ld", (unsigned long)f_size);
}

If the file is stdin or a pipe. POSIX, ANSI C won't work.
It will going return 0 if the file is a pipe or stdin.

Opinion: You should use POSIX standard instead. Because, it has 64bit support.

Answer 6

If you're fine with using the std c library:

#include <sys/stat.h>
off_t fsize(char *file) {
    struct stat filestat;
    if (stat(file, &filestat) == 0) {
        return filestat.st_size;
    }
    return 0;
}

Answer 7

And if you're building a Windows app, use the GetFileSizeEx API as CRT file I/O is messy, especially for determining file length, due to peculiarities in file representations on different systems ;)

Answer 8

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 9

I found a method using fseek and ftell and a thread with this question with answers that it can't be done in just C in another way.

You could use a portability library like NSPR (the library that powers Firefox).

Answer 10

In plain ISO C, there is only one way to determine the size of a file which is guaranteed to work: To read the entire file from the start, until you encounter end-of-file.

However, this is highly inefficient. If you want a more efficient solution, then you will have to either

• rely on platform-specific behavior, or
• revert to platform-specific functions, such as stat on Linux or GetFileSize on Microsoft Windows.

In contrast to what other answers have suggested, the following code is not guaranteed to work:

fseek( fp, 0, SEEK_END );
long size = ftell( fp );

Even if we assume that the data type long is large enough to represent the file size (which is questionable on some platforms, most notably Microsoft Windows), the posted code has the following problems:

The posted code is not guaranteed to work on text streams, because according to §7.21.9.4 ¶2 of the ISO C11 standard, the value of the file position indicator returned by ftell contains unspecified information. Only for binary streams is this value guaranteed to be the number of characters from the beginning of the file. There is no such guarantee for text streams.

The posted code is also not guaranteed to work on binary streams, because according to §7.21.9.2 ¶3 of the ISO C11 standard, binary streams are not required to meaningfully support SEEK_END.

That being said, on most common platforms, the posted code will work, if we assume that the data type long is large enough to represent the size of the file.

However, on Microsoft Windows, the characters \r\n (carriage return followed by line feed) will be translated to \n for text streams (but not for binary streams), so that the file size you get will count \r\n as two bytes, although you are only reading a single character (\n) in text mode. Therefore, the results you get will not be consistent.

On POSIX-based platforms (e.g. Linux), this is not an issue, because on those platforms, there is no difference between text mode and binary mode.

Answer 11

C++ MFC extracted from windows file details, not sure if this is better performing than seek but if it is extracted from metadata I think it is faster because it doesn't need to read the entire file

ULONGLONG GetFileSizeAtt(const wchar_t *wFile)
{
    WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA fileInfo;
    ULONGLONG FileSize = 0ULL;
    //https://learn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-getfileattributesexa?redirectedfrom=MSDN
    //https://learn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/windows/win32/api/fileapi/ns-fileapi-win32_file_attribute_data?redirectedfrom=MSDN
    if (GetFileAttributesEx(wFile, GetFileExInfoStandard, &fileInfo))
    {
        ULARGE_INTEGER ul;
        ul.HighPart = fileInfo.nFileSizeHigh;
        ul.LowPart = fileInfo.nFileSizeLow;
        FileSize = ul.QuadPart;
    }
    return FileSize;
}

Answer 12

Try this --

fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
unsigned long int file_size = ftell(fp);
rewind(fp);

What this does is first, seek to the end of the file; then, report where the file pointer is. Lastly (this is optional) it rewinds back to the beginning of the file. Note that fp should be a binary stream.

file_size contains the number of bytes the file contains. Note that since (according to climits.h) the unsigned long type is limited to 4294967295 bytes (4 gigabytes) you'll need to find a different variable type if you're likely to deal with files larger than that.

Answer 13

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

long get_file_size(char *path)
{
    FILE *fp;
    long size = -1;
    /* Open file for reading */
    fp = fopen(path, "r");
    fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
    size = ftell(fp); 
    fclose(fp);
    return size;
}

Answer 14

I have a function that works well with only stdio.h. I like it a lot and it works very well and is pretty concise:

size_t fsize(FILE *File) {
    size_t FSZ;
    fseek(File, 0, 2);
    FSZ = ftell(File);
    rewind(File);
    return FSZ;
}

Answer 15

You can open the file, go to 0 offset relative from the bottom of the file with

#define SEEKBOTTOM   2

fseek(handle, 0, SEEKBOTTOM)  

the value returned from fseek is the size of the file.

I didn't code in C for a long time, but I think it should work.