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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Discussion on buffering of standard I/O library Post 302497881 by jim mcnamara on Friday 18th of February 2011 10:22:27 AM
Old 02-18-2011
The std C stdio calls work like this:

Code:
while data in file
  read data into buffer
  while data in buffer
    parse out a piece of the data:
      fgetc returns  one character
      fgets returns a line
  end
end

Stevens & Rago 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Envrionment' has a chapter section on FILE I/O. Buffering is explained fully there.

One thing to note: modern disks have large buffers of their own which affects the performance of the stdio calls in C as well.
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GETS(3) 						     Linux Programmer's Manual							   GETS(3)

NAME
fgetc, fgets, getc, getchar, gets, ungetc - input of characters and strings SYNOPSIS
#include <stdio.h> int fgetc(FILE *stream); char *fgets(char *s, int size, FILE *stream); int getc(FILE *stream); int getchar(void); char *gets(char *s); int ungetc(int c, FILE *stream); DESCRIPTION
fgetc() reads the next character from stream and returns it as an unsigned char cast to an int, or EOF on end of file or error. getc() is equivalent to fgetc() except that it may be implemented as a macro which evaluates stream more than once. getchar() is equivalent to getc(stdin). gets() reads a line from stdin into the buffer pointed to by s until either a terminating newline or EOF, which it replaces with ''. No check for buffer overrun is performed (see BUGS below). fgets() reads in at most one less than size characters from stream and stores them into the buffer pointed to by s. Reading stops after an EOF or a newline. If a newline is read, it is stored into the buffer. A '' is stored after the last character in the buffer. ungetc() pushes c back to stream, cast to unsigned char, where it is available for subsequent read operations. Pushed - back characters will be returned in reverse order; only one pushback is guaranteed. Calls to the functions described here can be mixed with each other and with calls to other input functions from the stdio library for the same input stream. For non-locking counterparts, see unlocked_stdio(3). RETURN VALUE
fgetc(), getc() and getchar() return the character read as an unsigned char cast to an int or EOF on end of file or error. gets() and fgets() return s on success, and NULL on error or when end of file occurs while no characters have been read. ungetc() returns c on success, or EOF on error. CONFORMING TO
ANSI - C, POSIX.1 BUGS
Never use gets(). Because it is impossible to tell without knowing the data in advance how many characters gets() will read, and because gets() will continue to store characters past the end of the buffer, it is extremely dangerous to use. It has been used to break computer security. Use fgets() instead. It is not advisable to mix calls to input functions from the stdio library with low - level calls to read() for the file descriptor associ- ated with the input stream; the results will be undefined and very probably not what you want. SEE ALSO
read(2), write(2), ferror(3), fopen(3), fread(3), fseek(3), puts(3), scanf(3), unlocked_stdio(3) GNU
1993-04-04 GETS(3)
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