negative stat value

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to use File::stat to get the file size of a file like so:

my $file = "c:/autoexec.bat";
my $fStats = stat($file);
print "Size is: " . $fStats[7]. "\n";
[download]

This works fine on small files, but any file teh exceeds the 32-bit integer has a negative value for size. Does anyone know how for me to get the actual value of the file, other than a DOS DIR? I don't want to do a DOS DIR and parse the output.

Edit Masem 2001-08-23 - Added CODE tags

Comment on negative stat value Download Code

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Re: negative stat value by jlongino (Parson) on Aug 23, 2001 at 21:24 UTC
Just a quick suggestion. BTW, I don't have any files that large to test, so you might encounter the same problem with this. But give it a try: `my $size = -s "filename"; print $size;` [download] If the code and the comments disagree, then both* are probably wrong.* -- Norm Schryer	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: negative stat value by Anonymous Monk on Aug 23, 2001 at 23:41 UTC
Unfortunately, this does retrieve the same results as STAT, but a positive is I found another way to get a files size. Does anyone know if stat uses a Binary or ASCII representation?	[reply]
(tye)Re: negative stat value by tye (Sage) on Aug 24, 2001 at 11:27 UTC
You need to build your copy of Perl with "large file support" enabled. This causes Perl to use 8-byte integers for items related to file size instead of 4-byte integers. This is only available on when building Perl on certain operating systems. My overly quick search turned up: Perl can be built to understand large files (files larger than 2 gigabytes) on some systems. To do so, Configure can be run with -Duselargefiles. which should get you started. - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]