Copy program: File Permission Denied - c

Question

My following program, which copies a file, won't allow me to copy files because of "permission denied". However, I gave it permissions.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
int fdinput, fdoutput; //file pointers
char arrbuf[5000]; //size of what can be read in file
ssize_t bytesR, bytesW;//number of what input returns
mode_t mode = S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR | S_IXUSR | S_IRGRP | S_IROTH |S_IXOTH ;
fdinput = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY); //pointing to read file
fdoutput = open(argv[2], O_WRONLY);//pointing to write file
if(fdinput == -1){
perror("the source file cant be opened");
return 1;
}
if(fdoutput == -1){
perror("the written file cant be opened");
return 2;
}
while((bytesR = read(fdinput, arrbuf, sizeof arrbuf)) > 0){
bytesW = write(fdoutput, arrbuf, (ssize_t) bytesR);
}
close(fdinput);
close(fdoutput);
return 0;
}

Answer 1

The problem is in the call to the system call open() for the destination file (i.e.: the file to be created as a result of the copy):
fdoutput = open(argv[2], O_WRONLY);
Making possible the creation of the destination file
First, the call above to open() opens the file with the given name by argv[2], only if it already exits. Otherwise, the system call fails (errno is set to ENOENT) and perror() produces:
the written file cant be opened: No such file or directory
In order to create the file if it does not exist yet, the O_CREAT flag has to ORed together with O_WRONLY.
Truncating an already existing destination file
If the destination file already exist you surely want to truncate the length of that already existing file to zero at the moment of open()ing. That can by achieved by ORing the O_TRUNC flag together with the other flags.
Providing the permissions for the file to be created
Let's look at the open() system call's prototype:
int open(const char *path, int oflag, ...);
The ... at the end is to specify a kind of optional argument. That argument is used by open() only when a new file is being created. It provides the mode bits to be applied for the file to be created. This is not exactly the permissions for the file to be created, but it is strongly related to them (for more info see: file mode creation mask).
You created mode of type mode_t but just forgot to pass it to open().
With all exposed above in mind, your call should look like:
fdoutput = open(argv[2], O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, mode);