what's a good way to check a file size (as part of a "make check") from automake?

[Ed Hartnett]

Howdy all!

Here at the World Headquarters of the netCDF data format, we are
wondering how to get a file size in an automake test?

(Our test, in this case, is to generate a data file with some of our
command line utilities, and then check the size of the output file.)

Should we just use 'ls -l $file' with sed to parse the output for the
file size? 

If so, do we have to check for the existence of ls and sed during the
configure? Or is going to be found everywhere?

Or is there some more clever way to check the size of a file?

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Ed

-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden