Im most familiar with solaris.  Atleast on solaris lseek interprets its signed arg as the unsigned value with the same bit pattern.  I cannot be certain that this is common across other operating systems. 

On Jul 13, 2011 8:09 AM, "Antoine Pitrou" <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Antoine Pitrou <pitrou@free.fr> added the comment:
>
>> In addition I would like the posix_lseek function to accept a value
>> larger than 2^63 as a seek offset
>
> How would it work? The C lseek() takes a signed (64-bit) offset as argument, so we would have to call it multiple times anyway.
>
> ----------
> nosy: +neologix, pitrou
> versions: +Python 3.2, Python 3.3
>
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue12545>
> _______________________________________