NAME

ceil - calculate the ceiling of a number

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

LIBRARY

Math library (libm, -lm)

SYNOPSIS

Header File

#include <math.h>

Prototype

double ceil(double x);

#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

This function returns the ceiling of x.

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

This function returns, as a double, the smallest integer that is not less than x. You may safely cast that value to a long (or an int if it fits).

These functions return the ceiling of x.

If x is integral, +0, -0, NaN, or infinite, x itself is returned.

EXAMPLE

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("This is CS%i\n", (int) ceil(49.9));
}

ERRORS

No errors occur. POSIX.1-2001 documents a range error for overflows, but see NOTES.

ATTRIBUTES

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

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

STANDARDS

C11, POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY

C99, POSIX.1-2001.

The variant returning double also conforms to SVr4, 4.3BSD, C89.

NOTES

SUSv2 and POSIX.1-2001 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 error-handling stuff is 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 IEEE-754 standard 32-bit and 64-bit floating-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).)

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.