portability

In my program, I stat the files they want and send the data over. The fields of a stat struct are all special types: struct stat { dev_t st_dev; /* ID of device containing file */ ino_t st_ino; /* inode number */ mode_t st_mode; /* protection */ nlink_t st_nlink; /* number of hard links */ uid_t st_uid; /* user ID of owner */ gid_t st_gid; /* group ID of owner */ dev_t st_rdev; /* device ID (if special file) */ off_t st_size; /* total size, in bytes */ blksize_t st_blksize; /* blocksize for file system I/O */ blkcnt_t st_blocks; /* number of 512B blocks allocated */ time_t st_atime; /* time of

I'd like to convert my simple pure .Net 2.0 console utility into a portable exe which I could just put on an USB stick and run without having to worry whether the CLR and framework libraries are installed on a particular machine or not. Stackoverflow already has some information on using Mono and Mkbundle for creating self-contained Windows exes from .Net-projects, but what I would like to have is a compact but useful HOWTO. What are the minimum steps for achieving a portability from a simple C# Visual Studio project? I have found a simple how-to here , however, as I have not tested it myself,

I'm trying to build a 32-bit float out of its 4 composite bytes. Is there a better (or more portable) way to do this than with the following method? #include <iostream> typedef unsigned char uchar; float bytesToFloat(uchar b0, uchar b1, uchar b2, uchar b3) { float output; *((uchar*)(&output) + 3) = b0; *((uchar*)(&output) + 2) = b1; *((uchar*)(&output) + 1) = b2; *((uchar*)(&output) + 0) = b3; return output; } int main() { std::cout << bytesToFloat(0x3e, 0xaa, 0xaa, 0xab) << std::endl; // 1.0 / 3.0 std::cout << bytesToFloat(0x7f, 0x7f, 0xff, 0xff) << std::endl; // 3.4028234 × 10^38 (max single

How can I change my current working directory in C++ in a platform-agnostic way? I found the direct.h header file, which is Windows compatible, and the unistd.h , which is UNIX/POSIX compatible. The chdir function works on both POSIX ( manpage ) and Windows (called _chdir there but an alias chdir exists). Both implementations return zero on success and -1 on error. As you can see in the manpage, more distinguished errno values are possible in the POSIX variant, but that shouldn't really make a difference for most use cases. For C++, boost::filesystem::current_path (setter and getter prototypes

The C++ standard does not discuss the underlying layout of float and double types, only the range of values they should represent. (This is also true for signed types, is it two's compliment or something else) My question is: What the are techniques used to serialize/deserialize POD types such as double and float in a portable manner? At the moment it seems the only way to do this is to have the value represented literally(as in "123.456"), The ieee754 layout for double is not standard on all architectures. Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall gives in his Guide to Network Programming some code to pack