I have a pendrive at /dev/sdc.
I want to write a simple file-system to it. How would I open this as file? It is possible to open with fopen?
I've tried to clear it but no bytes are returned.
while (fgetc(device) != EOF) {
fputc(0, device);
}
Although it is possible that you could open the device file with fopen() and use C stdio functions to manipulate it, it would probably be more appropriate for your purpose to open it with POSIX open() (thus obtaining a file descriptor rather than a FILE *) and to thereafter operate on it with the POSIX file-descriptor-based I/O functions, such as write() and read(). These provide an inherently binary interface to the file, without any library-level buffering other than what you provide yourself, and on Unix-like operating systems they are more conventional than C stdio functions for low-level operations such as you are proposing.
Related
The fgetc(3) function takes a FILE * as its input stream. Must I reimplement character-at-a-time input with read(2), or is there a <unistd.h>-style equivalent taking an integer file descriptor instead?
No, there isn't such a thing, and please never do read(fd, &ch, sizeof(char)) (explanations below).
The function read(2) is usually implemented as a system call to the operating system kernel. Although the internal (and funky) details of such a thing shall not be discused here, the overall idea is that system calls are (usually) not something cheap.
It would be inefficient for both the userspace application and the kernel to do a system call just to get a single character from a file descriptor.
For instance, fgetc(3) usually ends up doing some buffering inside the structure of the FILE object. This means that the internal read(2) from fgetc(3) wouldn't just read a single character, but rather it'll try to get more for the sake of efficiency.
Anyway, it's not usually a good idea to mess up with such low-level stuff. You can get all the benefits of buffering (and of FILEs overall) by using fdopen(3) to create a FILE object from a file descriptor, as your question appears to imply that you have at hand just a raw file descriptor at the moment.
If you want to, you can open a file using open() -
int fh = open("abc.txt", O_RDONLY, S_IREAD); // there are different permissions you can provide (refer to link).
and then you can use fh in read() calls.
I am working on an embedded system with no filesystem and I need to execute programs that take input data from files specified via command like arguments or directly from stdin.
I know it is possible to bake-in the file data with the binary using the method from this answer: C/C++ with GCC: Statically add resource files to executable/library but currently I would need to rewrite all the programs to access the data in a new way.
Is it possible to bake-in a text file, for example, and access it using a fake file pointer to stdin when running the program?
If your system is an OS-less bare-metal system, then your C library will have "retargetting" stubs or hooks that you need to implement to hook the library into the platform. This will typically include low-level I/O functions such as open(), read(), write(), seek() etc. You can implement these as you wish to implement the basic stdin, stdout, stderr streams (in POSIX and most other implementations they will have fixed file descriptors 0, 1 and 2 respectively, and do not need to be explicitly opened), file I/O and in this case for managing an arbitrary memory block.
open() for example will be passed a file or device name (the string may be interpreted any way you wish), and will return a file descriptor. You might perhaps recognise "cfgdata:" as a device name to access your "memory file", and you would return a unique descriptor that is then passed into read(). You use the descriptor to reference data for managing the stream; probably little more that an index that is incremented by the number if characters read. The same index may be set directly by the seek() implementation.
Once you have implemented these functions, the higher level stdio functions or even C++ iostreams will work normally for the devices or filesystems you have supported in your low level implementation.
As commented, you could use the POSIX fmemopen function. You'll need a libc providing it, e.g. musl-libc or possibly glibc. BTW for benchmarking purposes you might install some tiny Linux-like OS on your hardware, e.g. uclinux
I don't find any difference through test.
What's the key to decide on this?
fopen is a portable interface that any C environment should provide. Also, its result is a buffered stream (FILE*) that can be used with the convenient stdio functions.
open is a Unix/POSIX-specific interface. Its result is a bare (unbuffered) file descriptor, which has to be used with low-level system calls. It does allow some more fine-grained control over I/O (see the list of flags in the POSIX standard), so sometimes you might want to open a file and then perhaps fdopen it to get stdio and buffering.
I thought fsync() does fflush() internally, so using fsync() on a stream is OK. But I am getting an unexpected result when executed under network I/O.
My code snippet:
FILE* fp = fopen(file, "wb");
/* multiple fputs() calls like: */
fputs(buf, fp);
...
...
fputs(buf.c_str(), fp);
/* get fd of the FILE pointer */
fd = fileno(fp);
#ifndef WIN32
ret = fsync(fd);
#else
ret = _commit(fd);
fclose(fp);
But it seems _commit() is not flushing the data (I tried on Windows and the data was written on a Linux exported filesystem).
When I changed the code to be:
FILE* fp = fopen(file, "wb");
/* multiple fputs() calls like: */
fputs(buf, fp);
...
...
fputs(buf.c_str(), fp);
/* fflush the data */
fflush(fp);
fclose(fp);
it flushes the data.
I am wondering if _commit() does the same thing as fflush(). Any inputs?
fflush() works on FILE*, it just flushes the internal buffers in the FILE* of your application out to the OS.
fsync works on a lower level, it tells the OS to flush its buffers to the physical media.
OSs heavily cache data you write to a file. If the OS enforced every write to hit the drive, things would be very slow. fsync (among other things) allows you to control when the data should hit the drive.
Furthermore, fsync/commit works on a file descriptor. It has no knowledge of a FILE* and can't flush its buffers. FILE* lives in your application, file descriptors live in the OS kernel, typically.
The standard C function fflush() and the POSIX system call fsync() are conceptually somewhat similar. fflush() operates on C file streams (FILE objects), and is therefore portable.
fsync() operate on POSIX file descriptors.
Both cause buffered data to be sent to a destination.
On a POSIX system, each C file stream has an associated file descriptor, and all the operations on a C file stream will be implemented by delegating, when necessary, to POSIX system calls that operate on the file descriptor.
One might think that a call to fflush on a POSIX system would cause a write of any data in the buffer of the file stream, followed by a call of fsync() for the file descriptor of that file stream. So on a POSIX system there would be no need to follow a call to fflush with a call to fsync(fileno(fp)). But is that the case: is there a call to fsync from fflush?
No, calling fflush on a POSIX system does not imply that fsync will be called.
The C standard for fflush says (emphasis added) it
causes any unwritten data for [the] stream to be delivered to the host environment to be written to the file
Saying that the data is to be written, rather than that is is written implies that further buffering by the host environment is permitted. That buffering by the "host environment" could include, for a POSIX environment, the internal buffering that fsync flushes. So a close reading of the C standard suggests that the standard does not require the POSIX implementation to call fsync.
The POSIX standard description of fflush does not declare, as an extension of the C semantics, that fsync is called.
fflush() and fsync() can be used to try and ensure data is written to the storage media (but it is not always be possible):
first use fflush(fp) on the output stream (fp being a FILE * obtained from fopen or one of the standard streams stdout or stderr) to write the contents of the buffer associated with the stream to the OS.
then use fsync(fileno(fp)) to tell the OS to write its own buffers to the storage media.
Note however that fileno() and fsync() are POSIX functions that might not be available on all systems, notably Microsoft legacy systems where alternatives may be named _fileno(), _fsync() or _commit()...
I could say that for simplicity:
use fsync() with not streaming files (integer file descriptors)
use fflush() with file streams.
Also here is the help from man:
int fflush(FILE *stream); // flush a stream, FILE* type
int fsync(int fd); // synchronize a file's in-core state with storage device
// int type
To force the commitment of recent changes to disk, use the sync() or fsync() functions.
fsync() will synchronize all of the given file's data and metadata with the permanent storage device. It should be called just before the corresponding file has been closed.
sync() will commit all modified files to disk.
I think below document from python (https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html) clarifies it very well.
os.fsync(fd) Force write of file with filedescriptor fd to disk. On
Unix, this calls the native fsync() function; on Windows, the MS
_commit() function.
If you’re starting with a Python file object f, first do f.flush(),
and then do os.fsync(f.fileno()), to ensure that all internal buffers
associated with f are written to disk.
Availability: Unix, and Windows starting in 2.2.3.
Is there any reason (other than syntactic ones) that you'd want to use
FILE *fdopen(int fd, const char *mode);
or
FILE *fopen(const char *path, const char *mode);
instead of
int open(const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);
when using C in a Linux environment?
First, there is no particularly good reason to use fdopen if fopen is an option and open is the other possible choice. You shouldn't have used open to open the file in the first place if you want a FILE *. So including fdopen in that list is incorrect and confusing because it isn't very much like the others. I will now proceed to ignore it because the important distinction here is between a C standard FILE * and an OS-specific file descriptor.
There are four main reasons to use fopen instead of open.
fopen provides you with buffering IO that may turn out to be a lot faster than what you're doing with open.
fopen does line ending translation if the file is not opened in binary mode, which can be very helpful if your program is ever ported to a non-Unix environment (though the world appears to be converging on LF-only (except IETF text-based networking protocols like SMTP and HTTP and such)).
A FILE * gives you the ability to use fscanf and other stdio functions.
Your code may someday need to be ported to some other platform that only supports ANSI C and does not support the open function.
In my opinion the line ending translation more often gets in your way than helps you, and the parsing of fscanf is so weak that you inevitably end up tossing it out in favor of something more useful.
And most platforms that support C have an open function.
That leaves the buffering question. In places where you are mainly reading or writing a file sequentially, the buffering support is really helpful and a big speed improvement. But it can lead to some interesting problems in which data does not end up in the file when you expect it to be there. You have to remember to fclose or fflush at the appropriate times.
If you're doing seeks (aka fsetpos or fseek the second of which is slightly trickier to use in a standards compliant way), the usefulness of buffering quickly goes down.
Of course, my bias is that I tend to work with sockets a whole lot, and there the fact that you really want to be doing non-blocking IO (which FILE * totally fails to support in any reasonable way) with no buffering at all and often have complex parsing requirements really color my perceptions.
open() is a low-level os call. fdopen() converts an os-level file descriptor to the higher-level FILE-abstraction of the C language. fopen() calls open() in the background and gives you a FILE-pointer directly.
There are several advantages to using FILE-objects rather raw file descriptors, which includes greater ease of usage but also other technical advantages such as built-in buffering. Especially the buffering generally results in a sizeable performance advantage.
fopen vs open in C
1) fopen is a library function while open is a system call.
2) fopen provides buffered IO which is faster compare to open which is non buffered.
3) fopen is portable while open not portable (open is environment specific).
4) fopen returns a pointer to a FILE structure(FILE *); open returns an integer that identifies the file.
5) A FILE * gives you the ability to use fscanf and other stdio functions.
Unless you're part of the 0.1% of applications where using open is an actual performance benefit, there really is no good reason not to use fopen. As far as fdopen is concerned, if you aren't playing with file descriptors, you don't need that call.
Stick with fopen and its family of methods (fwrite, fread, fprintf, et al) and you'll be very satisfied. Just as importantly, other programmers will be satisfied with your code.
If you have a FILE *, you can use functions like fscanf, fprintf and fgets etc. If you have just the file descriptor, you have limited (but likely faster) input and output routines read, write etc.
open() is a system call and specific to Unix-based systems and it returns a file descriptor. You can write to a file descriptor using write() which is another system call.
fopen() is an ANSI C function call which returns a file pointer and it is portable to other OSes. We can write to a file pointer using fprintf.
In Unix:
You can get a file pointer from the file descriptor using:
fP = fdopen(fD, "a");
You can get a file descriptor from the file pointer using:
fD = fileno (fP);
Using open, read, write means you have to worry about signal interaptions.
If the call was interrupted by a signal handler the functions will return -1
and set errno to EINTR.
So the proper way to close a file would be
while (retval = close(fd), retval == -1 && ernno == EINTR) ;
I changed to open() from fopen() for my application, because fopen was causing double reads every time I ran fopen fgetc . Double reads were disruptive of what I was trying to accomplish. open() just seems to do what you ask of it.
open() will be called at the end of each of the fopen() family functions. open() is a system call and fopen() are provided by libraries as a wrapper functions for user easy of use
Depends also on what flags are required to open. With respect to usage for writing and reading (and portability) f* should be used, as argued above.
But if basically want to specify more than standard flags (like rw and append flags), you will have to use a platform specific API (like POSIX open) or a library that abstracts these details. The C-standard does not have any such flags.
For example you might want to open a file, only if it exits. If you don't specify the create flag the file must exist. If you add exclusive to create, it will only create the file if it does not exist. There are many more.
For example on Linux systems there is a LED interface exposed through sysfs. It exposes the brightness of the led through a file. Writing or reading a number as a string ranging from 0-255. Of course you don't want to create that file and only write to it if it exists. The cool thing now: Use fdopen to read/write this file using the standard calls.
opening a file using fopen
before we can read(or write) information from (to) a file on a disk we must open the file. to open the file we have called the function fopen.
1.firstly it searches on the disk the file to be opened.
2.then it loads the file from the disk into a place in memory called buffer.
3.it sets up a character pointer that points to the first character of the buffer.
this the way of behaviour of fopen function
there are some causes while buffering process,it may timedout. so while comparing fopen(high level i/o) to open (low level i/o) system call , and it is a faster more appropriate than fopen.