Trouble with creating an empty file using C programming language in UNIX environment - unix

Question

I have recently started programming in UNIX environment. I need to write a program which creates an empty file with name and size given in the terminal using this commands
gcc foo.c -o foo.o
./foo.o result.txt 1000
Here result.txt means the name of the newly created file, and 1000 means the size of the file in bytes.
I know for sure that lseek function moves the file offset, but the trouble is that whenever I run the program it creates a file with a given name, however the size of the file is 0.
Here is the code of my small program.
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd;
char *file_name;
off_t bytes;
mode_t mode;
if (argc < 3)
{
perror("There is not enough command-line arguments.");
//return 1;
}
file_name = argv[1];
bytes = atoi(argv[2]);
mode = S_IWUSR | S_IWGRP | S_IWOTH;
if ((fd = creat(file_name, mode)) < 0)
{
perror("File creation error.");
//return 1;
}
if (lseek(fd, bytes, SEEK_SET) == -1)
{
perror("Lseek function error.");
//return 1;
}
close(fd);
return 0;
}

Answer 1

If you aren't allowed to use any other functions to assist in creating a "blank" text file, why not change your file mode on creat() then loop-and-write:
int fd = creat(file_name, 0666);
for (int i=0; i < bytes; i++) {
int wbytes = write(fd, " ", 1);
if (wbytes < 0) {
perror("write error")
return 1;
}
}
You'll want to have some additional checks here but, that would be the general idea.
I don't know whats acceptable in your situation but, possibly adding just the write() call after lseek() even:
// XXX edit to include write
if ((fd = creat(file_name, 0666)) < 0) {
perror("File creation error");
//return 1;
}
// XXX seek to bytes - 1
if (lseek(fd, bytes - 1, SEEK_SET) == -1) {
perror("lseek() error");
//return 1;
}
// add this call to write a single byte # position set by lseek
if (write(fd, " ", 1) == -1) {
perror("write() error");
//return 1;
}
close(fd);
return 0;