Is there a system call I can make from C or C++ to get the PHYSICAL location of a file on disk (track number, sector number, size, etc...).

Hi,

check man lstat. that gives you the inode-number, block-size but not "real physical location" on the disk. I think that depends on the filesystem and thats allocation table, cluster size and fragmentation.

hth
-fe

Hey, thanks. Have been poking around the inode possibility but it does look like at that level we are still in the virtual file system, which does not seem to have the physical partition & block information.

Need access to the physical file management system to get that information ...

I take that back. It turns out inode does have the block info I need. thanks.