Read from File, or STDIN

You're thinking it wrong.

What you are trying to do:

If stdin exists use it, else check whether the user supplied a filename.

What you should be doing instead:

If the user supplies a filename, then use the filename. Else use stdin.

You cannot know the total length of an incoming stream unless you read it all and keep it buffered. You just cannot seek backwards into pipes. This is a limitation of how pipes work. Pipes are not suitable for all tasks and sometimes intermediate files are required.

First, ask the program to tell you what is wrong by checking the errno, which is set on failure, such as during fseek or ftell.

Others (tonio & LatinSuD) have explained the mistake with handling stdin versus checking for a filename. Namely, first check argc (argument count) to see if there are any command line parameters specified if (argc > 1), treating - as a special case meaning stdin.

If no parameters are specified, then assume input is (going) to come from stdin, which is a stream not file, and the fseek function fails on it.

In the case of a stream, where you cannot use file-on-disk oriented library functions (i.e. fseek and ftell), you simply have to count the number of bytes read (including trailing newline characters) until receiving EOF (end-of-file).

For usage with large files you could speed it up by using fgets to a char array for more efficient reading of the bytes in a (text) file. For a binary file you need to use fopen(const char* filename, "rb") and use fread instead of fgetc/fgets.

You could also check the for feof(stdin) / ferror(stdin) when using the byte-counting method to detect any errors when reading from a stream.

The sample below should be C99 compliant and portable.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>

long getSizeOfInput(FILE *input){
   long retvalue = 0;
   int c;

   if (input != stdin) {
      if (-1 == fseek(input, 0L, SEEK_END)) {
         fprintf(stderr, "Error seek end: %s\n", strerror(errno));
         exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
      }
      if (-1 == (retvalue = ftell(input))) {
         fprintf(stderr, "ftell failed: %s\n", strerror(errno));
         exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
      }
      if (-1 == fseek(input, 0L, SEEK_SET)) {
         fprintf(stderr, "Error seek start: %s\n", strerror(errno));
         exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
      }
   } else {
      /* for stdin, we need to read in the entire stream until EOF */
      while (EOF != (c = fgetc(input))) {
         retvalue++;
      }
   }

   return retvalue;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
   FILE *input;

   if (argc > 1) {
      if(!strcmp(argv[1],"-")) {
         input = stdin;
      } else {
         input = fopen(argv[1],"r");
         if (NULL == input) {
            fprintf(stderr, "Unable to open '%s': %s\n",
                  argv[1], strerror(errno));
            exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
         }
      }
   } else {
      input = stdin;
   }

   printf("Size of file: %ld\n", getSizeOfInput(input));

   return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}