[c] How should I print types like off_t and size_t?

I'm trying to print types like off_t and size_t. What is the correct placeholder for printf() that is portable?

Or is there a completely different way to print those variables?

You'll want to use the formatting macros from inttypes.h.

See this question: Cross platform format string for variables of type size_t?

As I recall, the only portable way to do it, is to cast the result to "unsigned long int" and use %lu.

printf("sizeof(int) = %lu", (unsigned long) sizeof(int));

To print off_t:

printf("%jd\n", (intmax_t)x);

To print size_t:

printf("%zu\n", x);

To print ssize_t:

printf("%zd\n", x);

See 7.19.6.1/7 in the C99 standard, or the more convenient POSIX documentation of formatting codes:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fprintf.html

If your implementation doesn't support those formatting codes (for example because you're on C89), then you have a bit of a problem since AFAIK there aren't integer types in C89 that have formatting codes and are guaranteed to be as big as these types. So you need to do something implementation-specific.

For example if your compiler has long long and your standard library supports %lld, you can confidently expect that will serve in place of intmax_t. But if it doesn't, you'll have to fall back to long, which would fail on some other implementations because it's too small.

Looking at man 3 printf on Linux, OS X, and OpenBSD all show support for %z for size_t and %t for ptrdiff_t (for C99), but none of those mention off_t. Suggestions in the wild usually offer up the %u conversion for off_t, which is "correct enough" as far as I can tell (both unsigned int and off_t vary identically between 64-bit and 32-bit systems).

I saw this post at least twice, because the accepted answer is hard to remeber for me(I rarely use z or j flags and they are seems not platform independant).

The standard never says clearly the exact data length of size_t, so I suggest you should first check the length size_t on your platform then select one of them:

if sizeof(size_t) == 4 use PRIu32
if sizeof(size_t) == 8 use PRIu64

And I suggest using stdint types instead of raw data types for consistancy.

For Microsoft, the answer is different. VS2013 is largely C99 compliant but "[t]he hh, j, z, and t length prefixes are not supported." For size_t "that is, unsigned __int32 on 32-bit platforms, unsigned __int64 on 64-bit platforms" use prefix I (capital eye) with type specifier o, u, x, or X. See VS2013 Size specification

As for off_t, it is defined as long in VC\include\sys\types.h.

use "%zo" for off_t. (octal) or "%zu" for decimal.

Which version of C are you using?

In C90, the standard practice is to cast to signed or unsigned long, as appropriate, and print accordingly. I've seen %z for size_t, but Harbison and Steele don't mention it under printf(), and in any case that wouldn't help you with ptrdiff_t or whatever.

In C99, the various _t types come with their own printf macros, so something like "Size is " FOO " bytes." I don't know details, but that's part of a fairly large numeric format include file.