Libraries Examples

There is very different support of largefile and 64on32 mixtures within the libraries around. Some have started to use off_t in their headers without regard of the fact that it is not a constant type anymore. Others are just not aware of file-descriptor inheritance problems. And a few are trying to be smart - exporting a dual interface for both 32bit-off_t and 64bit-off_t and recognizing the various largefile defines that can be given.

The C library and largefile specification are given as an example for a dual interface library, that exports both API calls for 32bit-off_t and 64bit-off_t. You will find that some other libraries in a typical system do so too, the testscript of this site will try to auto-recognize these.

The zlib library is discussed for being compiled as 32bit-off_t usually and many many programs to link to it even that those are compiled as 64bit-off_t.

And GTK2 library is discussed for showing how to do it right even in the existance of exported API calls that look very much alike the unix system calls, like "lseek()" and such.