Random Access

The need to move around

Sometimes when reading from or writing to file, we may want to jump to a different location in the file and start reading or writing from there. The fseek function lets us do exactly that. We can give the number of bytes after which the read or write is to take place. This is done by specifying a physical location and the offset in number of bytes from that location.

A physical location can be specified as one of the following arguments to fseek:

• SEEK_SET: The beginning of the file
• SEEK_CUR: The current position in the file
• SEEK_END: The end of the file