C over the years

Does anyone know why did the definitions of many functions in the C standard library got changed to return ssize_t instead of int? For instance read and write, both returning -1 in case of error, whilst all declarations of ssize_t I've seen are unsigned. What is this crazyness?

>>9

everyone just used long instead

everyone just used int instead

Hence, any functions that were subsequently redefined to use ssize_t have to use a type that is compatible with long

ssize_t is 32 bits in 32 bit linux, unlike long if I am not mistaken.