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Here's the first sentence of the DESCRIPTION section of the stat(2) man page on my Linux systems:

    These functions return information about a file.


Somebody sack the writer ;) - so, OK, I doubt I'd argue the toss if it were an interview situation. But when writing a comment or documentation I think I'd take inspiration from the documentation for either of these two fine systems.

OS X: (OK, so I lied about the "fine" part)

    The stat() function obtains information about the file pointed to by path
Windows, here the VC++ CRT - fantastically poorly described, if you ask me, though of course you shouldn't be using any of this POSIX shit on Windows, so if it confuses anybody enough to make them go and find FindFirstFile then it can only be a good thing:

    Get status information on a file




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