Can't view device files

[mc-butler]

Important

This issue was migrated from Trac:

Origin	https://midnight-commander.org/ticket/1777
Reporter	gotar (gotar@….pl)

Trying to view some device an error is reported:
Cannot view: not a regular file
In my opinion this should be only a warning and such operation could continue if desired as it worked a long time and a few versions before.

...

now it's forbidden

        if (!S_ISREG (st.st_mode)) {
            mc_close (fd);
            mcview_show_error (view, _(" Cannot view: not a regular file "));
            g_free (view->filename);
            view->filename = NULL;
            goto finish;
        }

and we have one problem - calculate filesize.
fstat return 0 for block devices...
as a workaround, we can use ftell like this

off_t mc_ftell (int fd)
{
    fseek(fd, 0L, SEEK_END);
    return ftell(fd);
}

[mc-butler]

Changed by andrew_b (@aborodin) on Nov 11, 2009 at 9:04 UTC (comment 1)

• Type changed from defect to enhancement

[mc-butler]

Changed by angel_il (@ilia-maslakov) on Jan 19, 2010 at 6:34 UTC (comment 2)

• Description edited

[mc-butler]

Changed by andrew_b (@aborodin) on Nov 2, 2011 at 12:27 UTC (comment 3)

• Milestone changed from 4.7 to Future Releases
• Branch state set to no branch

[mc-butler]

Changed by zaytsev (@zyv) on Feb 21, 2025 at 7:28 UTC (comment 4)

Ticket #1968 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.