Read and write to binary files in C?

Question

Does anyone have an example of code that can write to a binary file. And also code that can read a binary file and output to screen. Looking at examples I can write to a fi

Answer 1

this questions is linked with the question How to write binary data file on C and plot it using Gnuplot by CAMILO HG. I know that the real problem have two parts: 1) Write the binary data file, 2) Plot it using Gnuplot.

The first part has been very clearly answered here, so I do not have something to add.

For the second, the easy way is send the people to the Gnuplot manual, and I sure someone find a good answer, but I do not find it in the web, so I am going to explain one solution (which must be in the real question, but I new in stackoverflow and I can not answer there):

After write your binary data file using fwrite(), you should create a very simple program in C, a reader. The reader only contains the same structure as the writer, but you use fread() instead fwrite(). So it is very ease to generate this program: copy in the reader.c file the writing part of your original code and change write for read (and "wb" for "rb"). In addition, you could include some checks for the data, for example, if the length of the file is correct. And finally, your program need to print the data in the standard output using a printf().

For be clear: your program run like this

$ ./reader data.dat

X_position Y_position  (it must be a comment for Gnuplot)*

1.23 2.45

2.54 3.12

5.98 9.52

Okey, with this program, in Gnuplot you only need to pipe the standard output of the reader to the Gnuplot, something like this:

plot '< ./reader data.dat'

This line, run the program reader, and the output is connected with Gnuplot and it plot the data.

*Because Gnuplot is going to read the output of the program, you must know what can Gnuplot read and plot and what can not.