offsetof(3) — Linux manual page

NAME \| LIBRARY \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| RETURN VALUE \| STANDARDS \| HISTORY \| EXAMPLES \| COLOPHON

offsetof(3)             Library Functions Manual             offsetof(3)

NAME top

       offsetof - offset of a structure member

LIBRARY top

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS top

       #include <stddef.h>

       size_t offsetof(type, member);

DESCRIPTION top

       The macro offsetof() returns the offset of the field member from
       the start of the structure type.

       This macro is useful because the sizes of the fields that compose
       a structure can vary across implementations, and compilers may
       insert different numbers of padding bytes between fields.
       Consequently, an element's offset is not necessarily given by the
       sum of the sizes of the previous elements.

       A compiler error will result if member is not aligned to a byte
       boundary (i.e., it is a bit field).

RETURN VALUE top

       offsetof() returns the offset of the given member within the
       given type, in units of bytes.

STANDARDS top

       C11, POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY top

       POSIX.1-2001, C89.

EXAMPLES top

       On a Linux/i386 system, when compiled using the default gcc(1)
       options, the program below produces the following output:

           $ ./a.out
           offsets: i=0; c=4; d=8 a=16
           sizeof(struct s)=16

   Program source

       #include <stddef.h>
       #include <stdio.h>
       #include <stdlib.h>

       int
       main(void)
       {
           struct s {
               int i;
               char c;
               double d;
               char a[];
           };

           /* Output is compiler dependent */

           printf("offsets: i=%zu; c=%zu; d=%zu a=%zu\n",
                  offsetof(struct s, i), offsetof(struct s, c),
                  offsetof(struct s, d), offsetof(struct s, a));
           printf("sizeof(struct s)=%zu\n", sizeof(struct s));

           exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
       }

COLOPHON top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.9.1.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2024-06-26.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-06-15                    offsetof(3)

Pages that refer to this page: readdir(3), size_t(3type)