Lecture Objectives

Lecture 21 Objectives

At the end of today's class you should

KNOW:

That files provide a way to store data permanently (beyond the execution of a program)
Opening/closing a file associates/disassociates a file pointer with the operating system's information about the file
That files may be opened in read, write, or append mode
Once a file has been opened, subsequent read/write operations are processed using the file pointer
The difference between text files and binary files

BE ABLE TO:

Open, close, and read/write to a text file

Sample Exam Question:

Write a segment of C code that will:
  - open a file for writing.  The file will be stored in the current directory
    under the name "student.dat"
  - if the file could not be opened, print an error message
  - otherwise, write these three lines to the file:
               John A. Student
               WPI
               2011
  - close the file