Flat ASCII File Data Access

[mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu]

>I have tried this sort of stuff of MS-DOS, and it doesn't seem to 
>do much good. Has anyone else gotten improvements this way? What
>DOES do some good is to get a good disk cache program.

>I have done things like this in MS-DOS and it works *really well*.  I have
>a tiny flatfile manager that uses lseek and read to goto and read specific
>records, and it works much faster than using streams.  (That is, I use
>open() to open a file, *not* fopen().)

Perhaps our mileage varies because we are driving different kinds of disk
drives. I volunteer to make a scientific survey. Any computer mag
out there want to pay me? It would make a nice article. No, I won't
do it for free.

Doug McDonald