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

Question

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

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

int exists(const char fname)

{

    FILE file;

    if ((file = fopen(fname, "r")))

    {

        fclose(file);

        return 1;

    }

    return 0;

}

cross-platform filesystem

3 years ago by vishaljlf39

2 Answers

Login / Signup to Answer the Question.

Login Signup

**akshay1995** · Answer 1 · 2021-05-19T11:17:25



FILE *file;

    if((file = fopen("sample.txt","r"))!=NULL)

        {

            // file exists

            fclose(file);

        }

    else

        {

            //File not found, no memory leak since 'file' == NULL

            //fclose(file) would cause an error

        }

**kshitijrana14** · Answer 2 · 2021-05-20T13:44:20

Use stat like this:



#include <sys/stat.h>   // stat

#include <stdbool.h>    // bool type



bool file_exists (char *filename) {

  struct stat   buffer;   

  return (stat (filename, &buffer) == 0);

}

and call it like this:



#include <stdio.h>      // printf



int main(int ac, char

av) {
if (ac != 2)
return 1;

if (file_exists(av[1]))
printf("%s exists\n", av[1]);
else
printf("%s does not exist\n", av[1]);

return 0;
}

C TUTORIAL

C PROGRAMS

INTERVIEW TESTS

EXECUTE CODE

C++ TUTORIAL

C++ PROGRAMS

INTERVIEW TESTS

EXECUTE CODE

PYTHON TUTORIAL

PYTHON HOW TOS

INTERVIEW TESTS

EXECUTE CODE

JAVA TUTORIAL

JAVA CODE EXAMPLES

SPRING TUTORIAL

MORE IN JAVA

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

COMPUTER NETWORK

OPERATING SYSTEM

DBMS & SQL

PL/SQL

MongoDB

EXECUTE SQL

ANDROID DEVELOPMENT

GO LANGUAGE

LINUX

DOCKER

HTML TAGS (A to Z)

CSS REFERENCES

SASS/SCSS

KOTLIN

GAME DEVELOPMENT

PHP

GIT GUIDE

JAVASCRIPT

ADVANCED DSA

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

2 Answers

Login / Signup to Answer the Question.