The fwide function determines the orientation of the stream pointed to by stream and sets the orientation of a nonoriented stream according to the mode argument in the following way: If the mode argument is: Then the fwide function: greater than makes the stream wide-oriented. zero less than zero makes the stream byte-oriented. zero does not alter the orientation of the stream. If the orientation of the stream has already been set, fwide does not alter it. Because no error status is defined for fwide, the calling application should check errno if fwide returns a 0.