What is a File? What are the Basic Operations Performed on Files?

A file is a collection of records, each record provides info to the user. These files are arranged in the disk and can be accused through file handling fns provides by the standard C library.

(OR)

A file is a placed on the disk where a group of related data is stored. 

In C language there are two categories of files:

1. Text (or) formatted files.

2. Binary ( or) unformatted files.

Text data files:

Text data file is a sequence of characters. A text file consists of multiple lines. Each line is separated by a new line character and last line is terminated by on end of file mark. The characters are translated into human readable form when retrieve.

Binary data files: 

A binary file is a sequence of bits organized in the form of blocks. There sequence of bits doesn’t have any end of line or end of file mark. There is no character translation in binary files.

The file consists of large amount of data, which can be read or modify depending up on the requirement. C supports a number of a number of functions that have the ability to perform basic file operations, which include:

Naming a file..

Opening a file.

Reading data from a file.

Writing data to a file, and

closing a file.

These operations are performed with the help of a structure FILE and a file pointer.

File pointer: 

File pointer is a pointer to the info stored in the file. It define various things about the file. Such as its name, status and current active position on it. The file pointer is a pointer variable of type FILE and can be declared as follows:

Syntax: FILE   File –pointer;

Ex: FILE  fp;