What's the best way to check if a file exists in C?

Question

Is there a better way than simply trying to open the file?

int exists(const char *fname)
{
    FILE *file;
    if ((file = fopen(fname, \"r\")))
    {
               


        

Answer 1

Yes. Use stat(). See the man page forstat(2).

stat() will fail if the file doesn't exist, otherwise most likely succeed. If it does exist, but you have no read access to the directory where it exists, it will also fail, but in that case any method will fail (how can you inspect the content of a directory you may not see according to access rights? Simply, you can't).

Oh, as someone else mentioned, you can also use access(). However I prefer stat(), as if the file exists it will immediately get me lots of useful information (when was it last updated, how big is it, owner and/or group that owns the file, access permissions, and so on).