statfstat

Statfstat is a proposed or hypothetical API that consolidates file status retrieval in POSIX-like environments by combining the capabilities of the stat and fstat functions into a single interface. It is not part of the POSIX standard and remains uncommon in mainstream systems as of the current era.

Interface and behavior: In a typical design, statfstat provides two entry points: statfstat_path and statfstat_fd. statfstat_path takes a const char *path and fills a struct stat with metadata about the file identified by the path. statfstat_fd takes an int fd corresponding to an open file and fills a struct stat with the status of that file descriptor. Both return 0 on success and -1 on error, setting errno similarly to stat and fstat.

Returned data: The struct stat (or a compatible variant) includes file type and permissions (st_mode), size (st_size), device and inode numbers (st_dev, st_ino), link count (st_nlink), ownership (st_uid, st_gid), and timestamps (st_atime, st_mtime, st_ctime), among others. The exact fields can vary by implementation but generally align with the standard struct stat.

Rationale and use: The unified API simplifies calling code that must handle both path-based and descriptor-based metadata retrieval, aids cross-language wrappers, and can streamline portability layers. However, the lack of standardization means adoption depends on platform-specific libraries or projects.

See also: stat, fstat, lstat, struct stat, statfs.