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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | VERSIONS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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lseek(2) System Calls Manual lseek(2)
lseek - reposition read/write file offset
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h>
off_t lseek(int fd, off_t offset, int whence);
lseek() repositions the file offset of the open file description
associated with the file descriptor fd to the argument offset
according to the directive whence as follows:
SEEK_SET
The file offset is set to offset bytes.
SEEK_CUR
The file offset is set to its current location plus offset
bytes.
SEEK_END
The file offset is set to the size of the file plus offset
bytes.
lseek() allows the file offset to be set beyond the end of the
file (but this does not change the size of the file). If data is
later written at this point, subsequent reads of the data in the
gap (a "hole") return null bytes ('\0') until data is actually
written into the gap.
Seeking file data and holes
Since Linux 3.1, Linux supports the following additional values
for whence:
SEEK_DATA
Adjust the file offset to the next location in the file
greater than or equal to offset containing data. If offset
points to data, then the file offset is set to offset.
SEEK_HOLE
Adjust the file offset to the next hole in the file greater
than or equal to offset. If offset points into the middle
of a hole, then the file offset is set to offset. If there
is no hole past offset, then the file offset is adjusted to
the end of the file (i.e., there is an implicit hole at the
end of any file).
In both of the above cases, lseek() fails if offset points past
the end of the file.
These operations allow applications to map holes in a sparsely
allocated file. This can be useful for applications such as file
backup tools, which can save space when creating backups and
preserve holes, if they have a mechanism for discovering holes.
For the purposes of these operations, a hole is a sequence of
zeros that (normally) has not been allocated in the underlying
file storage. However, a filesystem is not obliged to report
holes, so these operations are not a guaranteed mechanism for
mapping the storage space actually allocated to a file.
(Furthermore, a sequence of zeros that actually has been written
to the underlying storage may not be reported as a hole.) In the
simplest implementation, a filesystem can support the operations
by making SEEK_HOLE always return the offset of the end of the
file, and making SEEK_DATA always return offset (i.e., even if the
location referred to by offset is a hole, it can be considered to
consist of data that is a sequence of zeros).
The _GNU_SOURCE feature test macro must be defined in order to
obtain the definitions of SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE from <unistd.h>.
The SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA operations are supported for the
following filesystems:
• Btrfs (since Linux 3.1)
• OCFS (since Linux 3.2)
• XFS (since Linux 3.5)
• ext4 (since Linux 3.8)
• tmpfs(5) (since Linux 3.8)
• NFS (since Linux 3.18)
• FUSE (since Linux 4.5)
• GFS2 (since Linux 4.15)
Upon successful completion, lseek() returns the resulting offset
location as measured in bytes from the beginning of the file. On
error, the value (off_t) -1 is returned and errno is set to
indicate the error.
EBADF fd is not an open file descriptor.
EINVAL whence is not valid. Or: the resulting file offset would
be negative, or beyond the end of a seekable device.
ENXIO whence is SEEK_DATA or SEEK_HOLE, and offset is beyond the
end of the file, or whence is SEEK_DATA and offset is
within a hole at the end of the file.
EOVERFLOW
The resulting file offset cannot be represented in an
off_t.
ESPIPE fd is associated with a pipe, socket, or FIFO.
On Linux, using lseek() on a terminal device fails with the error
ESPIPE.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD.
SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE are nonstandard extensions also present in
Solaris, FreeBSD, and DragonFly BSD; they are proposed for
inclusion in the next POSIX revision (Issue 8).
See open(2) for a discussion of the relationship between file
descriptors, open file descriptions, and files.
If the O_APPEND file status flag is set on the open file
description, then a write(2) always moves the file offset to the
end of the file, regardless of the use of lseek().
Some devices are incapable of seeking and POSIX does not specify
which devices must support lseek().
dup(2), fallocate(2), fork(2), open(2), fseek(3), lseek64(3),
posix_fallocate(3)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 lseek(2)
Pages that refer to this page: copy_file_range(2), dup(2), llseek(2), open(2), pread(2), read(2), readahead(2), readv(2), syscalls(2), write(2), fseek(3), getdirentries(3), lseek64(3), off_t(3type), posix_fallocate(3), seekdir(3), stdin(3), cpuid(4), proc_pid_mem(5), pipe(7), signal-safety(7), spufs(7), user_namespaces(7), xfs_io(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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