Eu acredito que isso seja um mal-entendido.
A citação completa do livro é
The three symbolic constants—SEEK_SET
, SEEK_CUR
, and SEEK_END
—were introduced
with System V. Prior to this, whence was specified as 0 (absolute), 1 (relative to the current
offset), or 2 (relative to the end of file). Much software still exists with these numbers hard
coded.
The character l
in the name lseek
means ‘‘long integer.’’ Before the introduction of the
off_t
data type, the offset argument and the return value were long integers. lseek was
introduced with Version 7 when long integers were added to C. (Similar functionality was
provided in Version 6 by the functions seek
and tell
.)
Em nenhum lugar do texto diz nada sobre o valor de retorno ser um descritor de arquivo em qualquer ponto no tempo.