I'm trying to create a calculator with flex and bison which gets a set of operations (results are assigned to variables). The calculator uses a memory to store these variables. When I do this calculations via terminal (stdin keyboard) everything works fine. However, when I try to use a file, nothing is stored in the memory.
I have a .y and .l
This is what I have specified in the .y.
extern FILE* yyin;
And in the main method:
yyin = fopen(argv[1], "rt");
yyparse ();
listTofile(list, argv[2]); //method that backups memory into a file
fclose(yyin);
When I for example type A = 2 + 2, the file will store the name variable and the result. This perfectly work when the prompt ask me an instruction.
However, when a file is provided parser detects all but does not store anything (checked using flex -d)
With flex, generally you need to call yyrestart(yyin); to switch to a new input source to reset all the buffering source. That said, if you never read anything from yyin before your fopen call, this should not make any difference, as there should not be any cached buffer contents to reset.
Related
Assuming a plain text file, foo.txt, and two processes:
Process A, a shell script, overwrites the file in regular intervals
$ echo "example" > foo.txt
Process B, a C program, reads from the file in regular intervals
fopen("foo.txt", "r"); getline(buf, len, fp); fclose(fp);
In the C program, keeping the FILE* fp open after the initial fopen(), doing a rewind() and reading again does not seem to reflect the changes that have happened to the file in the meantime. Is the only way to see the updated contents by doing an fclose() and fopen() cycle, or is there a way to re-use the already opened FILE handle, yet reading the most recently written data?
For context, I'm simply trying to find the most efficient way of doing this.
On Unix/Linux, when you create a file with a name which already existed, the old file is not deleted or altered in any way. A new file is created and the directory is updated to point at the new file instead of the old one.
The old file will continue to exist as long as some directory entry points at it (Unix file systems allow the same file to be pointed to by multiple directories) or some program has an open file handle to the file, which is more relevant to your question.
As long as you don't close fp, it continues to refer to the original file, even if that file is no longer referenced by the filesystem. When you close fp, the file will get garbage collected automatically, and the next time you open foo.txt, you'll get a file descriptor for whatever file happens to have that name at that point in time.
In short, with the shell script you indicate, your C program must close and reopen the file in order to see the new contents.
Theoretically, it would be possible for the shell script to overwrite the same file without deleting it, but (a) that's tricky to get right; (b) it's prone to race conditions; and (c) closing and reopening the file is not that time-consuming. But if you did that, you would see the changes. [Note 1]
In particular, it's common (and easy) to append to an existing file, and if you have a shell script which does that, you can keep the file descriptor open and see the changes. However, in that case you would normally have already read to the end of the file before the new data was appended, and the standard C library treats the feof() indicator as sticky; once it gets set, you will continue to get an EOF indication from new reads. If you suspect that some process will be writing more data to the file, you should reset the EOF indication with fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_CUR); before retrying the read.
Notes
As #amadan points out in a comment, there are race conditions with echo text > foo.txt as well, although the window is a bit shorter. But you can definitely avoid race conditions by using the idiom echo text > temporary_file; mv -f temporary_file foo.txt, because the rename operation is atomic. Of course, that would definitely require you to close and reopen the file. But it's a good idea, particularly if the contents being written are long or critical, or if new files are created frequently.
Well I'm making a program that initially asks to login or register.
I need to make a counter for each time the program is accessed (after the login).
C language using the array of functions and file Login Register
The method to log in and register follows the one up.
My thing is due to the lifetime of the var, because I know the moment the program ends the var just restarts.
So far I tried many ways. By macros but once again soon as the program ends it restarts.
I'm starting now to make one saving in files.
I started just now so the function is very simple, but since I only have more 2 hours to deliver the work so I hope you guys help me.
Simple function:
At the definition of fp you should call the function fopen. From the documentation of fopen:
w+
Open for reading and writing. The file is created if it
does not exist, otherwise it is truncated. The stream is
positioned at the beginning of the file.
The file gets truncated and you need to read it before you open it for writing.
fp = fopen("contador.txt", "r");
if (!fp) {
perror("fopen");
return -1;
}
fscanf(fp, "%d", &contador);
fclose(fp);
fp = fopen("contador.txt", "w");
You can use fscanf for parsing the file and storing the value into your variable.
I am developing a command line application in C (linux environment) to edit a particular file format. This file format is a plain XML file, which is compressed, then encrypted, then cryptographically signed.
I'd like to offer an option to the user to edit this kind of file in an easy way, without the hassle of manualy extracting the file, editing it, and then compressing, encrypting and signing it.
Ideally, when called, my application should do the following:
Open the encrypted/compressed file and extract it to a temporary location (like /tmp)
Call an external text editor like nano or sublime-text or gedit depending on which is installed and maybe the user preferences. Wait until the user have edited the file and closed the text editor.
Read the modified temporary file and encrypt/compress it, replacing the old encrypted/compressed file
How can I achieve point no. 2?
I thought about calling nano with system() and waiting for it to return, or placing an inotify() on the temp file to know when it is modified by the graphical text editor.
Which solution is better?
How can i call the default text editor of the user?
Anything that can be done in a better way?
First, consider not writing an actual application or wrapper yourself, which calls another editor, but rather writing some kind of plugin for some existing editor which is flexible enough to support additional formats and passing its input through decompression.
That's not the only solution, of course, but it might be easier for you.
With your particular approach, you could:
Use the EDITOR and/or VISUAL command-line variables (as also pointed out by #KamilCuk) to determine which editor to use.
Run the editor as a child process so that you know when it ends execution, rather than having to otherwise communicate with it. Being notified of changes to the file, or even to its opening or closing, is not good enough, since the editor may make changes multiple files, and some editors don't even keep the file open while you work on it in them.
Remember to handle the cases of the editor failing to come up; or hanging; or you getting some notification to stop waiting for the editor; etc.
Call an external text editor like nano or sublime-text or gedit depending on which is installed and maybe the user preferences. Wait until the user have edited the file and closed the text editor.
Interesting question. One way to open the xml file with the user's default editor is using the xdg-open, but it doesn't give the pid of the application, in which user will edit the file.
You can use xdg-mime query default application/xml to find out the .desktop file of the default editor, but then you have to parse this file to figure out the executable path of the program - this is exactly how xdg-open actually works, in the search_desktop_file() function the line starting with Exec= entry is simply extracted from the *.desktop to call the editor executable and pass the target file as argument... What I am trying to say, is, after you find the editor executable, you can start it, and wait until it's closed, and then check if the file content has been changed. Well, this looks like a lot of unnecessary work...
Instead, you can try a fixed well-known editor, such as gedit, to achieve the desired workflow. You can also provide user a way (i.e. a prompt or config file) to set a default xml editor, i.e. /usr/bin/sublime_text, which then can be used in your programm on next run.
However, the key is here to open an editor that blocks the calling process, until user closes the editor. After the editor is closed, you can simply check if the file has been changed and if so, perform further operations.
To find out, if the file contents have been modified, you can use the stat system call to get the inode change time of the file, before you open the file, and then compare the timestamp value with the current one once it is closed.
i.e.:
stat -c %Z filename
Output: 1558650334
Wrapping up:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
void execute_command(char* cmd, char* result) {
FILE *fp;
fp = popen(cmd, "r");
fscanf (fp, "%s" , result);
}
int get_changetime(char* filename) {
char cmd[4096];
char output[10];
sprintf(cmd, "stat -c %%Z %s", filename);
execute_command(cmd, output);
return atoi(output);
}
int main() {
char cmd[4096];
char* filename = "path/to/xml-file.xml";
uint ctime = get_changetime(filename);
sprintf(cmd, "gedit %s", filename);
execute_command(cmd, NULL);
if (ctime != get_changetime(filename)) {
printf("file modified!");
// do your work here...
}
return 0;
}
I am just creating a basic file handling program.
the code is this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
FILE *p;
p=fopen("D:\\TENLINES.TXT","r");
if(p==0)
{
printf("Error",);
}
fclose(p);
}
This is giving Error, I cannot create files tried reinstalling the compiler and using different locations and names for files but no success.
I am using Windows 7 and compiler is Dev C++ version 5
Change the mode argument in fopen(const char *filename, const char *mode) from:
p=fopen("D:\\TENLINES.TXT","r");//this will not _create_ a file
if(p==0) // ^
To this:
p=fopen("D:\\TENLINES.TXT","w");//this will create a file for writing.
if(p==NULL) // ^ //If the file already exists, it will write over
//existing data.
If you want to add content to an existing file, you can use "a+" for the open mode.
See fopen() (for more open modes, and additional information about the fopen family of functions)
According to tutorial, fopen returns NULL when error occurs. Therefore, you should check if p equals NULL.
Also, in printf("Error",);, omit the comma after string.
Yes you should open the file in write mode.
Which creates the file . Read mode is only to read content
or else you can use "r+" for both read and write.
You should be able to open the file, but you need to make it first. Make a txt document with the name res.txt. It should be able to write your result into the text document.
<?php
$result = $variable1 . $variable2 "=" .$res ."";
echo $result;
$myfile = fopen("res.txt", "a+") or die("nope");
fwrite($myfile, $result);
fclose($myfile)
?>
fopen()
Syntax:
FILE *fp;
fp=fopen(“data.txt”,”r”);
if(fp!=NULL){
//file operations
}
It is necessary to write FILE in the uppercase. The function fopen() will open a file “data.txt”
in read mode.
The fopen() performs the following important task.
It searches the disk for opening the file.
In case the file exists, it loads the file from the disk into memory. If the file is found with huge contents then it loads the file part by part.
If the file does not exist this function returns a NULL. NULL is a macro defined character in the header file “stdio.h”. This indicates that it is unable to open file. There may be following reasons for failure of fopen() functions.
a.When the file is in protected or hidden mode.
b.The file may be used by another program.
It locates a character pointer, which points the first cha
racter of the file. Whenever a file is
opened the character pointer points to the first character of the file
I'm writing a file using a c code on a unix system . I open it , write a few lines and close it. Then i call a shell script, say code B where this file is to be used and then return back to main program. However, when code B tries to read the file, the file is empty.
I checked the file on the file system, its size is shown as 0 and no data is present in file. However after killing the running c code process, file has data present in it.
Here is the piece of code -
void writefile(){
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen("ABC.txt","w");
fputs("Some lines...\n",fp);
fclose(fp);
system("code_B ABC.txt");
}
Please advise how can I read the file in the shell script without stopping the c code process.
If there's some time between the fputs and fclose, add
fflush(fp);
This will cause the contents of the disk file to be written.
You should do fsync() after the fclose(), to guarantee the writing of the file to the disk.
Take a look at this question:
Does Linux guarantee the contents of a file is flushed to disc after close()?
The kernel ensures that data which is written to a file can be read back afterwards from a different process, even if it is not physically written to the disc yet. So, in usual scenarios, there is no need to call fsync() - still, even with fsync(), the filesystem could decide to further delay physical writes.
One common problem is that the C library has not flushed its buffers yet, in which case you would need to call fflush() - however, you are calling fclose() before launching your sub process, and fclose() internally calls fflush().
Actually, since system() is using a shell to launch the command passed as parameter, you can use the following simple SSCCE to verify that it works:
#include <stdio.h>
void writefile(){
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen("ABC.txt","w");
fputs("Some lines...\n",fp);
fclose(fp);
system("cat ABC.txt");
}
int main() {
writefile();
return 0;
}
Here, system() simply calls the cat command to print the file contents. The output is:
$ ./writefile
Some lines...