File offsets, active handles and stdio

Back in 2012 I wrote a patch to optimize ftell so that it doesn’t always flush buffers when it just has to report the current file offset. That patch unleashed a whole lot of pain due to the way in which the ftell code was written - it shared code with fseek, which is semantically different from ftell in a few ways. The general mess in libio code didn’t help matters much either.

Since that patch, a number of fixes went in to correct broken behaviour and it culminated in me essentially rewriting ftell. The main problems encountered were related to caching of the file offset in the underlying file to avoid a syscall, so Carlos suggested I write up a wiki document explaining the various scenarios. So I wrote File offsets in stdio stream and ftell in the glibc wiki.

Since this is a new ftell implementation, we’d love to get feedback on correctness (as bug reports) and performance (as bug reports, email, tweets, etc.).

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