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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: is struct stat buf.st_size always correct?
Message-ID: <12573@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 13 Apr 90 05:28:42 GMT
References: <21501@joshua.athertn.Atherton.COM> <7751@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 8

In article <7751@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
>Why use fread?  Why not a normal open and a normal read?  It would be
>less overhead.  On many systems (though not 4.0.3, I think), this has to
>yank the file a piece at a time through the stdio buffers.

However, if you use read(), you should write the code to loop on the
read() for the as-yet unread portion of the file until you get it all
or a 0 is returned.  fread() takes care of this for you.