Library I/O Functions

Abstract

This chapter covers library I/O functions. It explains the roles of library I/O functions and their advantages over system calls. It uses sample programs to show the relationship between library I/O functions and system calls, and it explains their similarities and fundamental differences. It describes the algorithms of library I/O functions in detail. These include the algorithms of fread, fwrite and fclose, with an emphasis on their interactions with read, write and close system calls. It describes the different modes of library I/O functions, which include char mode, line mode, structured records mode and formatted I/O operations. It explains the buffering schemes of file streams and shows the effects of different buffering schemes by example programs. It explains functions with varying parameters and how to access parameters using stdarg macros.

The programming project is to integrate the principles and programming techniques of the chapter to implement a printf-like function for formatted printing of chars, strings and numbers in different number bases in accordance with a format string. The basis of the printf-like function is putchar() of Linux, but it works exactly the same as the library function printf(). The purpose of the project is to let the reader understand how library I/O functions are implemented.

Keywords

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