> his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth

While I agree, I have seen interviewers where if he answered "fstat" they would have come back with "Wrong! fstat passes the structure back by reference, it does not return it!"

With this style of interview I can't blame him for thinking it might be a trick question and then trying to explain why he didn't say those other functions as an answer.