#pragma pack effect

Question

I was wondering if someone could explain to me what the #pragma pack preprocessor statement does, and more importantly, why one would want to use it.

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Answer 1

I've used it in code before, though only to interface with legacy code. This was a Mac OS X Cocoa application that needed to load preference files from an earlier, Carbon version (which was itself backwards-compatible with the original M68k System 6.5 version...you get the idea). The preference files in the original version were a binary dump of a configuration structure, that used the #pragma pack(1) to avoid taking up extra space and saving junk (i.e. the padding bytes that would otherwise be in the structure).

The original authors of the code had also used #pragma pack(1) to store structures that were used as messages in inter-process communication. I think the reason here was to avoid the possibility of unknown or changed padding sizes, as the code sometimes looked at a specific portion of the message struct by counting a number of bytes in from the start (ewww).