On 27/02/2010 15:14, Dave Lee wrote: >> If it (meddling with internal affairs, such as using _stat) hurts too >> much, then don't do it (use stat instead, it's standardized). > > An off-topic question: on system where both XXX() and _XXX() are available > (where XXX = open, read, write, access, chmod, ... etc), can one assume > what _XXX() does, and that _XXX() behaves the same as XXX()?
Not in general, no. Anything beginning with an underscore is, as a general rule, private and internal to the library or toolchain. Or, as is probably the case in the code this originally came from, it's a reference to the MSVC version of the function; MSVCRT contains a lot of the POSIX functions, but they're all not-quite fully compatible, so they are prefixed with an '_' to distinguish them. These functions are also available using MinGW, but you don't want to use them on Cygwin; remove the underscore and use the native POSIX version. However, the real problem in this case is that there is a prototype for stat(), but none for _stat(), in the include headers: > $ gcc -o statex statex.c --save-temps -g3 -gstabs+ -W -Wall > statex.c: In function 'main': > statex.c:9: warning: implicit declaration of function '_stat' > > $ Somehow, this bypasses some kind of hidden internal magic that (?i think?) substitutes the 64-bit version of stat for the regular one, and things go downhill from there. Moral of the story: *always* compile with warnings enabled, even for trivial test programs! cheers, DaveK -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple