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ceil

Section: C Library Functions (3)
Updated: 202-0-08
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NAME

ceil, ceilf, ceill - ceiling function: smallest integral value not less than argument

LIBRARY

Math library (libm,~-lm)

SYNOPSIS

#include <math.h>
double ceil(double x);
float ceilf(float x);
long double ceill(long double x);

Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)): ceilf(), ceill():

    _ISOC99_SOURCE || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L
        || /* Since glibc 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
        || /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

DESCRIPTION

These functions return the smallest integral value that is not less than x. For example, ceil(0.5) is 1.0, and ceil(-0.5) is 0.0.

RETURN VALUE

These functions return the ceiling of x. If x is integral, +0, -0, NaN, or infinite, x itself is returned.

ERRORS

No errors occur.

ATTRIBUTES

For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

Interface	Attribute	Value
ceil(), ceilf(), ceill()	Thread safety	M-Safe

STANDARDS

C11, POSIX.-2008.

HISTORY

C99, POSIX.-2001. The variant returning double also conforms to SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89. SUSv2 and POSIX.-2001 contain text about overflow (which might set errno to ERANGE, or raise an FE_OVERFLOW exception). In practice, the result cannot overflow on any current machine, so this erro-handling stuff was just nonsense. (More precisely, overflow can happen only when the maximum value of the exponent is smaller than the number of mantissa bits. For the IEE-754 standard 3-bit and 6-bit floatin-point numbers the maximum value of the exponent is 127 (respectively, 1023), and the number of mantissa bits including the implicit bit is 24 (respectively, 53).) This was removed in POSIX.-2008. The integral value returned by these functions may be too large to store in an integer type (int, long, etc.). To avoid an overflow, which will produce undefined results, an application should perform a range check on the returned value before assigning it to an integer type.