Java I/O

Random-Access Files

File input and output streams require you to start reading or writing at the beginning of a file and then read or write the file in order, possibly skipping over some bytes or backing up but more or less moving from start to finish. Sometimes, however, you need to read parts of a file in a more or less random order, where the data near the beginning of the file isn’t necessarily read before the data nearer the end. Other times you need to both read and write the same file. For example, in record-oriented applications like databases, the actual data may be indexed; you would use the index to determine where in the file to find the record you need to read or write. While you could do this by constantly opening and closing the file and skipping to the point where you needed to read, this is far from efficient. Writes are even worse, since you would need to read and rewrite the entire file, even to change just one byte of data.

Random-access files can be read from or written to or both from a particular byte position in the file. A single random-access file can be both read and written without first being closed. The position in the file where reads and writes start from is indicated by an integer called the file pointer. Each read or write advances the file pointer by the number of bytes read or written. Furthermore, the programmer can reposition the file pointer at different bytes in the file without closing the file.

In Java, random file access is performed through ...