advantage of using typedefs

I was looking at the source code of linux or open BSD. What I found
that lots of typedefs
were used. For example, consider the offset in a file. It was declared
as
off_t offset;
and off_t is typedefed as
typedef long off_t;

I wanted to know what advantage do we get by typedefs ? Why we did not
declare
offset simply as
long off_t;

Similar is the case with size of file and so on.....

Does any one has any clue of why do we use typedefs in such cases ?

Thanx for any help advance ....

.

Relevant Pages

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