are “seekp” & “seekg” interchangeable?

Question

Well I just noticed that by changing the position -in microsoft visual studio- through \"seekp\" I implicitelly also change the read-position, when handling files.

I

Answer 1

Update: So from all the comments and everything, it seems that for fstream, seekp and seekg use the same pointer. But for stringstream and probably other non-file based streams, they are separate.

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Original Post:

Doesn't work for me on linux with g++ 4.7.2. They seem to be independent:

#include 
#include 

int main(int, char**) {
    std::stringstream s("0123456789");
    std::cout << "put pointer: " << s.tellp() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "get pointer: " << s.tellg() << std::endl;
    std::cout << std::endl;
    s.seekp(2);
    std::cout << "put pointer: " << s.tellp() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "get pointer: " << s.tellg() << std::endl;
    std::cout << std::endl;
    s.seekg(4);
    std::cout << "put pointer: " << s.tellp() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "get pointer: " << s.tellg() << std::endl;
    std::cout << std::endl;
}

Output:

put pointer: 0
get pointer: 0

put pointer: 2
get pointer: 0

put pointer: 2
get pointer: 4

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Also the behaviour you describe sounds like it doesn't comply with the quotes here:

Sets the position of the get pointer. The get pointer determines the next location to be read in the source associated to the stream.

and here:

Sets the position of the put pointer. The put pointer determines the location in the output sequence where the next output operation is going to take place.