fpos_t returns negative value.

[Stremik]

Hi everybody.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
I'm writing a C program that opens a directory full of text files
and compares the contents of those files to one another.
I hit a little roadblock though...
One of the files turns out to be starting with first position
being a negative value.
I've tried using fgetpos with fpos_t,
I've also tried using ftell which returns an int,
I both cases, when I open the file and print out file
position as I'm grabbing letters, I get
-7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 etc
and it seems that the negative value cause the file to be
read backwards, because my otherwise working(with files that start
normally, that is starting at position 1)finishes reading as if it would
encounter EOF.
Any advice how to deal with this?

Thank you.