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ftell---return position in a stream or file

Synopsis
#include <stdio.h>
long ftell(FILE *fp);

Description
Objects of type FILE can have a "position" that records how much of the file your program has already read. Many of the stdio functions depend on this position, and many change it as a side effect.

The result of ftell is the current position for a file identified by fp. If you record this result, you can later use it with fseek to return the file to this position.

In the current implementation, ftell simply uses a character count to represent the file position; this is the same number that would be recorded by fgetpos.


Returns
ftell returns the file position, if possible. If it cannot do this, it returns -1L. Failure occurs on streams that do not support positioning; the global errno indicates this condition with the value ESPIPE.


Portability
ftell is required by the ANSI C standard, but the meaning of its result (when successful) is not specified beyond requiring that it be acceptable as an argument to fseek. In particular, other conforming C implementations may return a different result from ftell than what fgetpos records.

No supporting OS subroutines are required.



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