Re: stat signed/unsigned

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Michael Meskes <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 03:18:44PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>>> Thanks, but "man statfs" on linux-based systems shows it can be signed:
>>>> ...
>>> Sorry for the noise, I just used grep -r to find stuff like
>>>
>>> /usr/include/asm-generic/statfs.h:      __u32 f_files;
>>> /usr/include/asm-generic/statfs.h:      __u64 f_files;
>>> /usr/include/asm-generic/statfs.h:      __u64 f_files;
>>
>> Have you seen ever stat print a negative number
>> corresponding to that field?  Actually, I'll bet that
>> *has* happened... and considering the semantics
>> of that variable, I see no reason to print a signed value.
>
> On a related note, I was looking at removing -Wsign-compare warnings
> and noticed a lot are due to dealing with signed st_size, st_blocks etc.
> I searched and found no references to where these could ever be negative,
> and therefore I'm assuming that the type is only really to define the
> width and should always be interpreted as unsigned.
>
> So, I'll add an ST_SIZE() macro to system.h like:
> #define ST_SIZE(statbuf) ((uintmax_t) (statbuf).st_size)
> and also add the equivalent cast to ST_NBLOCKS etc.
>
> Then any code using them could deal just with unsigned variables,
> thus avoiding any -Wsign-compare warnings.

Hi Pádraig,

That sounds like it could be rather invasive...
>From an aesthetics/readability point of view, I'm not sure
I like the idea of using ST_SIZE (st) in place of "st.st_size".

More importantly, there are places in the code that compare stat.st_size
against negative numbers (at least remove.c).

I've resisted making coreutils "-Wsign-compare"-warning free for years,
because the cost of the required changes seems too high.
This might be one of those cases where it's better to mark
known-false-positive warnings and automatically filter them out
of a separate compilation with just -Wsign-compare.

I've started down this clean-up-Wsign-compare-warnings road
a few times, and inevitably end up concluding it's not worthwhile.