On Sat, 21 Jun 1997 00:01:29 -0700 
 greywolf@starwolf.starwolf.com (Data In~rte~vgri}ity EnginNO CARRIER) wrote:

 > Why, pray tell, are we bothering with signed off_t?  I mean, okay, 8192
 > exabytes is quite a bit and doubling it is probably pretty niggly once
 > you deal with data on that scale, but the only negative off_t that
 > gets returned by anything is -1 (or 2^64 - 1, if unsigned), unless I've
 > missed something.  Why not make off_t valid up to 2^64 - 2?
 > 
 > ...or did I miss something  here?

Umm...

Say you're in the middle of a file, and you want to seek back 1024 bytes:

	(void) lseek(fd, (off_t)(-1024), SEEK_CUR);

...you sort of need to be able to represent "negative" offsets.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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