magic cookies given back by ftell, and used in fseek

[Every system needs one]

In article <129 at lakart.UUCP>, dg at lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough) writes:
> There has been much discussion in this group on the fact that on certain
> systems (VMS I believe), ftell & fseek use magic cookies to tell about
> file position.

	No, not really.  They work fine on stream files.  The problem is
that they return record number on "Implied carriage control" (VMS default)
text files.
> [...] but have the ANSI comittee considered providing some means to convert
> from cookie format to and from character position in file. Come to that
> is such a thing possible?

No.  Only the record format, and ANSI doesn't usually say anything about
Digital's file system... they really shouldn't, anyway, as it is none of their
business.

> [...], or is it some other reason.

Yes.  It's the "real" storage format and RMS file access modes implied in the
C library.

use:

	ungetc( getc( fp));

This will correctly align records after a read so that ftell() doesn't
lie throught it's figurative teeth.


| Terry Lambert           UUCP: ...{ decvax, ihnp4 } ...utah-cs!century!terry |
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