Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16Programming with Files

In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the most commonly used functions for manipulating files. The standard Erlang release has a large number of functions for working with files. We’re going to concentrate on the small fraction of these that I use to write most of my programs and that you’ll use the most frequently as well. We’ll also see a few examples of techniques for writing efficient file handling code. In addition, I’ll briefly mention some of the more rarely used file operations so you’ll know they exist. If you want more details of the rarely used techniques, consult the manual pages.

We’ll concentrate on the following areas:

• Overview of the main modules used for manipulating files

• Different ways of ...