Writing a file from memory in C - c

I have been trying to write a file from memory in C, more specifically an executable file. Every time I try to use fputs it detects a '00' in memory after a bit and stops writing. But there is still the rest of the file that it has to write. In the file that I am trying to write there are '00's all over the place for padding. I have some code below for reference:
char *buffer;
buffer = malloc(size);
// ...
FILE *file;
file = fopen("somename","w");
fputs(buffer,file);
fclose(file);
Is there any way I would be able to have '00's in memory without fputs taking it as an EOF?
Thanks!

you should use 'fwrite' take the place of fpus

Related

How to rewind a file descriptor using only system calls?

I have this sample code where I'm trying to implement for my operating systems assignment a program that copies the contents of an input file to an output file. I'm only allowed to use POSIX system calls, stdio is forbidden.
I've thought about storing the contents in a buffer but in my implementation I must know the file descriptor contents size. I googled a little and found about
off_t fsize;
fsize = lseek (input, 0, SEEK_END);
But in this case my file descriptor (input) gets messed up and I can't rewind it to the start. I played around with the parameters but I can't figure a way to rewind it back to the first character in the file after using lseek. That's the only thing I need, having that I can loop byte by byte and copy all the contents of input to output.
My code is here, it's very short in case any of you want have to take a look:
https://github.com/lucas-sartm/OSAssignments/blob/master/copymachine.c
I figured it out by trial and error. All that was needed was to read the documentation and take a look at read() return values... This loop solved the issue.
while (read (input, &content, sizeof(content)) > 0){ //this will write byte by byte until end of buffer!
write (output, &content, sizeof(content));
}

Why the file is not written when I did fwrite() to it?

I'm basically trying to create a simple program that simulates a screen whose value is generated randomly and are outputted to a bmp file. However, there are some trouble in the file operation.. when the fwrite is called, the file stays at zero bytes, meaning nothing was written to that file.. I've tried changing the fopen modes (e.g "w+b", "wb+", "wb") but still no luck.. here is the code anyway
char resultFileName[BUFSIZ];
char currentDirectory[BUFSIZ];
//char generatedFileFolder[] = "\\generatedFile";
FILE *resultFile;
getcwd(currentDirectory, sizeof(currentDirectory));
snprintf(resultFileName, sizeof(resultFileName), "%s%s", currentDirectory, "\\result.bmp");
resultFile = fopen(resultFileName, "w+b");
BITMAPFILEHEADER bmfh;
BITMAPINFOHEADER bmih;
fwrite(&bmfh, sizeof(bmfh), 1, resultFile);
fwrite(&bmih, sizeof(bmih), 1, resultFile);
what am I doing wrong here?
You need to call fclose.
The I/O functions starting with f is buffered, which means they only write periodically (when reaching the maximum buffer size), or when you close it.
Since C is not a garbage-collected language (or language with the concept of destructor), your buffers are not flushed unless you flush it or close the file.

open a temporary C FILE* for input

I have a legacy function accepting a FILE* pointer in a library. The contents I would like to parse is actually in memory, not on disk.
So I came up with the following steps to work around this issue:
the data is in memory at this point
fopen a temporary file (using tmpnam or tmpfile) on disk for writing
fclose the file
fopen the same file again for reading - guaranteed to exist
change the buffer using setvbuf(buffer, size)
do the legacy FILE* stuff
close the file
remove the temporary file
the data can be discarded
On windows, it looks like this:
int bufferSize;
char buffer[bufferSize];
// set up the buffer here
// temporary file name
char tempName [L_tmpnam_s];
tmpnam_s(tempName, L_tmpnam_s);
// open/close/reopen
fopen_s(&fp, tempName,"wb");
fclose(fp);
freopen_s(&fp, tempName,"rb", fp);
// replace the internal buffer
setvbuf(fp, buffer, _IONBF, bufferSize);
fp->_ptr = buffer;
fp->_cnt = bufferSize;
// do the FILE* reading here
// close and remove tmp file
fclose(fp);
remove(tempName);
Works, but quite cumbersome. The main problem, aside from the backwardness of this approach, are:
the temporary name needs to be determined
the temporary file is actually written to disk
the temporary file needs to be removed afterwards
I'd like to keep things portable, so using Windows memory-mapped functions or boost's facilities is not an option. The problem is mainly that, while it is possible to convert a FILE* to an std::fstream, the reverse seems to be impossible, or at least not supported on C++99.
All suggestions welcome!
Update 1
Using a pipe/fdopen/setvbuf as suggested by Speed8ump and a bit of twiddling seems to work. It does no longer create files on disk nor does it consume extra memory. One step closer, except, for some reason, setvbuf is not working as expected. Manually fixing it up is possible, but of course not portable.
// create a pipe for reading, do not allocate memory
int pipefd[2];
_pipe(pipefd, 0, _O_RDONLY | _O_BINARY);
// open the read pipe for binary reading as a file
fp = _fdopen(pipefd[0], "rb");
// try to switch the buffer ptr and size to our buffer, (no buffering)
setvbuf(fp, buffer, _IONBF, bufferSize);
// for some reason, setvbuf does not set the correct ptr/sizes
fp->_ptr = buffer;
fp->_charbuf = fp->_bufsiz = fp->_cnt = bufferSize;
Update 2
Wow. So it seems that unless I dive into the MS-specific implementation CreateNamedPipe / CreateFileMapping, POSIX portability costs us an entire memcopy (of any size!), be it to file or into a pipe. Hopefully the compiler understands that this is just a temporary and optimizes this. Hopefully.
Still, we eliminated the silly device writing intermediate. Yay!
int pipefd[2];
pipe(pipefd, bufferSize, _O_BINARY); // setting internal buffer size
FILE* in = fdopen(pipefd[0], "rb");
FILE* out = fdopen(pipefd[1], "wb");
// the actual copy
fwrite(buffer, 1, bufferSize, out);
fclose(out);
// fread(in), fseek(in), etc..
fclose(in);
You might try using a pipe and fdopen, that seems to be portable, is in-memory, and you might still be able to do the setvbuf trick you are using.
Your setvbuf hack is a nice idea, but not portable. C11 (n1570):
7.21.5.6 The setvbuf function
Synopsis
#include <stdio.h>
int setvbuf(FILE * restrict stream,
char * restrict buf,
int mode, size_t size);
Description
[...] If buf is not a null pointer, the array it points to may be used instead of a buffer allocated by the setvbuf function [...] and the argument size specifies the size of the array; otherwise, size may determine the size of a buffer allocated by the setvbuf function. The contents of the array at any time are indeterminate.
There is neither a guarantee that the provided buffer is used at all, nor about what it contains at any point after the setvbuf call until the file is closed or setvbuf is called again (POSIX doesn't give more guarantees).
The easiest portable solution, I think, is using tmpfile, fwrite the data into that file, fseek to the beginning (I'm not sure if temporary files are guaranteed to be seekable, on my Linux system, it appears they are, and I'd expect them to be elsewhere), and pass the FILE pointer to the function. This still requires copying in memory, but I guess usually no writing of the data to the disk (POSIX, unfortunately, implicitly requires a real file to exist). A file obtained by tmpfile is deleted after closing.

File IO does not appear to be reading correctly

Disclaimer: this is for an assignment. I am not asking for explicit code. Rather, I only ask for enough help that I may understand my problem and correct it myself.
I am attempting to recreate the Unix ar utility as per a homework assignment. The majority of this assignment deals with file IO in C, and other parts deal with system calls, etc..
In this instance, I intend to create a simple listing of all the files within the archive. I have not gotten far, as you may notice. The plan is relatively simple: read each file header from an archive file and print only the value held in ar_hdr.ar_name. The rest of the fields will be skipped over via fseek(), including the file data, until another file is reached, at which point the process begins again. If EOF is reached, the function simply terminates.
I have little experience with file IO, so I am already at a disadvantage with this assignment. I have done my best to research proper ways of achieving my goals, and I believe I have implemented them to the best of my ability. That said, there appears to be something wrong with my implementation. The data from the archive file does not seem to be read, or at least stored as a variable. Here's my code:
struct ar_hdr
{
char ar_name[16]; /* name */
char ar_date[12]; /* modification time */
char ar_uid[6]; /* user id */
char ar_gid[6]; /* group id */
char ar_mode[8]; /* octal file permissions */
char ar_size[10]; /* size in bytes */
};
void table()
{
FILE *stream;
char str[sizeof(struct ar_hdr)];
struct ar_hdr temp;
stream = fopen("archive.txt", "r");
if (stream == 0)
{
perror("error");
exit(0);
}
while (fgets(str, sizeof(str), stream) != NULL)
{
fscanf(stream, "%[^\t]", temp.ar_name);
printf("%s\n", temp.ar_name);
}
if (feof(stream))
{
// hit end of file
printf("End of file reached\n");
}
else
{
// other error interrupted the read
printf("Error: feed interrupted unexpectedly\n");
}
fclose(stream);
}
At this point, I only want to be able to read the data correctly. I will work on seeking the next file after that has been finished. I would like to reiterate my point, however, that I'm not asking for explicit code - I need to learn this stuff and having someone provide me with working code won't do that.
You've defined a char buffer named str to hold your data, but you are accessing it from a separate memory ar_hdr structure named temp. As well, you are reading binary data as a string which will break because of embedded nulls.
You need to read as binary data and either change temp to be a pointer to str or read directly into temp using something like:
ret=fread(&temp,sizeof(temp),1,stream);
(look at the doco for fread - my C is too rusty to be sure of that). Make sure you check and use the return value.

File processing in c?

I have been given a raw file that holds several jpg images. I have to go through the file, find each jpg image, and put those images each in a separate file. So far I have code that can find each where each image begins and ends. I also have written code that names several file names I can use to put the pictures in. It is an array: char filename[] , that holds the names: image00.jpg - image29.jpg .
What I cannot figure out is how to open a file every time I find an image, an then close that file and open a new one for the next image. Do I need to use fwrite()? Also, each image is in blocks of 512 bytes, so I only have to check for a new image every 512 bytes once I find the first one. Do I need to add that into fwrite?
So, to summarize my questions, I don't understand how to use fwrite(), if that is what I should be using to write to these files.
Also, I do not know how to open the files using the names I have already created.
Thanks in advance for the help. Let me know if I need to post any other code.
Use fopen(rawfilename, "rb"); to open the raw file for reading. and fread to read from it.
Use fopen(outfilename, "wb"); to open output file for writing and fwrite to write to it.
As mentioned in my comment, you are assigning char *[] to char*, use char filename[] = "image00.jpg"; instead.
Don't forget to close each file after you finish its processing (r/w) (look at fclose() at the same site of other links)
Decide how much bytes to read each time by parsing the jpeg header. Use malloc to allocate the amount of bytes needed to be read, and remember, for each allocation of buffer you need to free the allocated buffer later.
Pretty much any book on C programming should cover the functions you need. As MByD pointed out, you'll want to use the functions fopen(), fwrite(), and fclose().
I imagine your code may include fragments that look something like
/* Warning: untested and probably out-of-order code */
...
char **filename = {
"image00.jpg", "image01.jpg", "image02.jpg",
...
"image29.jpg" };
...
int index = 0;
const int blocksize = 512; /* bytes */
...
index++;
...
FILE * output_file = fopen( filename[index], "wb");
fwrite( output_data, 1, blocksize, output_file );
fclose(output_file);
...

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