What is a File?
- A File is a collection of related records such as the records of employee in a company. Each record will be a collection of related data items called fields namely, employer name, number, department etc..Each field consists of group of characters. Many computer applications require that information must be written or read from an auxiliary device such as hard disk or floppy disk. Such a information will be stored in the storage devices in the form of data files.
- Data files allow us to store information permanently, and access or alter that information whenever required.
How a File will be useful?
There can be many reasons to use files.
- The first and the foremost reason is need of permanency of storage of data. If we want to preserve the output of any program for future use, it is not possible with out files. All the inputting files have been printed with the help of any output statements like printf, putchar etc..are never available for future use and the only solution in that case is to write the output in files.Similarly, if there is a large amount of data generated as output by a program, storing that output in file will help in easy analysis of the output,as user can see the whole output at any time even after complete execution of the program. These situations will explain the need of output files.
- The input files are also equally important and useful. If a program needs a lot of data to be inputted, user cannot keep on typing that again again for repeated execution of the program. In that case, all input data can be once written in a file and then that file can be easily used as the input file. Moreover the transfer of input data and/or the output data from one computer to another can be easily done by using files.
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