C Programming Absolute Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition

29. Saving Random Files to Your Computer

In This Chapter

• Opening random files

• Moving around in a file

This chapter shows you how to skip around in a file, reading and writing data as you go. The preceding chapter introduced methods you can use to write, read, or append data to a file. The problem is, when you open a sequential file for reading, you can only read it.

Sometimes you might want to read a customer structure from disk and change the customer’s balance. You certainly wouldn’t want to have to create a new file just so you could write that one change. Instead, you would want to read the customer information into a variable, change it, and then write it back to disk exactly where it first resided. As Figure 29.1 shows, random files ...