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Any suggestions on the best online tutorial/ebook/printed book regarding C libraries and latest c std? I would like to get more coverage on FILE I/O s
Thanks in advance

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A short, up-to-date follow‑up for (and thanks to and for the original pointers): a few compact, durable resources and practical tips for C FILE I/O that are still relevant years later.

Recommended reading (quick): K&R (The C Programming Language, 2nd ed.) for learning the basics; Harbison & Steele (C: A Reference Manual) for a thorough library and language reference; Plauger’s The Standard C Library for implementation detail; Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment for POSIX I/O. For fast, current online lookup of every stdio function (which standard added it, example usage, gotchas), use cppreference’s C I/O pages. (en.cppreference.com)

Standards note: the language and library evolved since 2010 — the published revision after C17 is C23 (ISO/IEC 9899:2024). For normative behavior (what is guaranteed vs implementation-defined) consult the standard or an annotated reference when behavior matters. (en.cppreference.com)

Practical FILE I/O checklist and gotchas:

  • Start with stdio: fopen/fclose, fread/fwrite, formatted I/O and fseek/ftell. Read the function pages for exact mode strings and platform notes; e.g., the "b" (binary) mode is meaningful on Windows and typically ignored on POSIX. (en.cppreference.com)
  • fread/fwrite return counts — they don’t tell EOF vs error; use feof() and ferror() for diagnostics. (en.cppreference.com)
  • Large files: prefer fseeko/ftello or build with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to get 64-bit offsets on systems where long is 32 bits. (sourceware.org)
  • When you need unbuffered control, special flags or atomic opens, use POSIX open/read/write (and the system man pages) rather than stdio. (man7.org)

If the task is to parse a structured format (XLS/XLSX) rather than plain files, use a dedicated library (or convert to CSV) — raw fread on a binary office file won’t be enough. These pointers should help bridge the short tutorials and the formal standard-level details.

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Member Avatar for creeps

Read a good book on it, but it might be a little too expensive for just file I/O. If you're looking for a reference, check the Dinkumware link in my signature.

Member Avatar for sree_ec

Read a good book on it, but it might be a little too expensive for just file I/O. If you're looking for a reference, check the Dinkumware link in my signature.

Thank you...
Any other suggestions..?

Member Avatar for sree_ec

Read a good book on it, but it might be a little too expensive for just file I/O. If you're looking for a reference, check the Dinkumware link in my signature.

No more suggestions? So marking as solved. Thanks to all

Member Avatar for creeps

Some other good books are the ones in O'Reilly's In a Nutshell series. This is the one on C. I haven't read it yet, but I plan to change this pretty soon.

Member Avatar for itpungaraja

how do i read a file in xls using c program

Member Avatar for itpungaraja

now i am using linux ubuntu. i got a small problem. the error msg got display
this word is
verifying DMI pool data.......
boot cd
unknow file system
grep resuce>
how do mount the file system?

how do i fsck the file system.

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