Programming

Corona is correct - most command line utilities are tuned and designed for a particular purpose, and really are very close to as good as it gets. Unless you are doing this to learn coding, or have some fun messing around with C, I would second the idea: use command line utilities.

A very good reason for this is the 'next guy'. Somebody may need to use what you have. Or modify it because the manager is having a bad day. If it is C code and does not quite cut it, that person will have to find the source and change it. Simplicity and transparency (like a shell script) has a lot to recommend it.

Dedicated well-designed C code is often provably faster than a script. But how fast do you have to go? That file is less than 1MB. So, C may save you 1 or 2ms on modern systems.

Code which calls system() a lot, like this one, are often exceptions to the rule. It uses C and shell instead of just shell

Corona688,

One more stupid question. From your example:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
        char buf[4096];
        char *n=tmpnam(NULL); // Use this as the file name, not tmp_file.

// get the file
... 

        FILE *fp=fopen(n, "r");
        unlink(n);
        // Read a line into 'buf' until we run out of lines
        while(fgets(buf, 4096, fp))
        {
                // Check the contents of 'buf' for what you want
        }
}

How do I get the results of:

Code:

rsync rsync://192.168.3.1/vpnc/test.conf

into the "n" temp file? Forgive me for my stupidity. Also when I attempt to compile my code, its says to use mkstemp

Honestly I wouldn't use rsync, I'd use scp.

Code:

scp username@host:/etc/passwd /tmp/filename

...and mkstemp will not do what I want because C is not creating the file here.

Unfortunately I have to use the above method (rsync) for obtaining the file. Let me see what I can come up with. Thanks for the help

There's more discussion on this here >>
Storing a Temporary File Using C
and here >>
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...83640239,d.aWw

And what protocol is rsync using? Often it's just sftp or scp.