Hi everyone,
I'm playing with fread and fwrite and found some strange behaviors.
Well, behavior that I wasn't expecting.
If I put my FILE in "unbuffered mode" with setvbuf() and I call
fwrite(), the memory pointer supplied to fwrite() is directly used as
the source of the bytes being written to the stream. This is exactly
what I expected since I'm unbuffered, ie no transit via some other
buffer.
But with fread, things are quite different. Let's say I'm unbuffered and
I write something like this:
fread(data, 1, 50, fp);
I expect fread() to takes the "data" ptr directly as the container of
the received bytes. But strangely, instead, fread() use the 1 bytes
buffer embedded in the FILE structure (_ubuf) as a transit buffer for
the received characters. This is absolutely not the behavior I expected.
If I tell the FILE stream to be unbuffered, I don't expect my data to
transit via some buffer, even if that buffer is as small as one byte.
It's still a buffer. Also, this behavior is quite inneficient since the
driver function responsible for getting characters from the stream is
called the number of bytes needed, in the example 50 times!!! Unbuffered
IO doesn't mean a device can't read bytes in sequence...
Am I missing something here or is this behavior strange?
Etienne Fortin
Sensio