Reading and writing binary data with streams
There comes a time when we must save variables or arrays in a program to a file. For example, if we make a stock-keeping program for a warehouse, we don't want to re-write the entire warehouse stocks every time we start the program. That would defeat the purpose of the program. With streams, it's easy to save variables as binary data in files for later retrieval.
In this chapter, we'll write two small programs: one that asks the user for two floats, saves them in an array, and writes them to a file, and another program that re-reads that array.
Getting ready
You only need the GCC compiler, the Make tool, and the generic Makefile for this recipe.
How to do it…
In this recipe, we'll write two small programs: one that writes and one that reads binary data. The data is an array of floats:
- Write the following code in a file and save it as
binary-write.c. Notice that we open the file in write mode...
