Re: fstat on mingw

[Paul Eggert]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

>       * functions.texi (Function Portability): Document fstat
>       limitation on mingw.

That's only one of the limitations.  As I understand it, the
limitations include;

st_atime, st_mtime, and st_ctime may not have 1-second resolution.

st_gid and st_uid are always 0.

st_dev and st_rdev are always equal.  It's not clear to me when
they're zero; the Microsoft documentation for _fstat says "If a
device, handle; otherwise 0." whereas for _stat it says "Drive number
of the disk containing the file",

st_ino is "meaningless" (see
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vccore98/HTML/_crt__stat.2c_._wstat.2c_._stati64.2c_._wstati64.asp>).

st_mode's rw bits have some constraints on them (I don't know what),
and its x bits are determined from the file name extension (!).

st_nlink is always 1 on non-NTFS file systems.  (Dunno about NTFS.)

Also, you must include <sys/types.h> before <sys/stat.h>.

Also, similar limitations apply to lstat and stat.

Also, I've heard that lstat and stat fail if passed a drive identifier
like "A:".

(There may be some other limitations too, but you're the DOS expert.  :-)

This is starting to get complicated.  Perhaps we should move the
Microsoft-related stuff into a separate file, and simply
cross-reference to it from the main files.  Many GNU developers don't
care much about porting to systems that have these problems.