How do I clear the whole contents of a file in C?

Question

I have a file with some of user1's data. I want to use the same file for user2 by clearing the content of the file.

My idea is that when a new user comes, data of the previous user should be clear and the same file should be ready for the new user.

Answer 1

As @stefan said using fopen() with "w" mode will do the job for you. When you open a file with "w" flag it creates an empty file for writing. If a file with the same name already exists its contents are erased and the file is treated as an empty new file.

If the file is already open you can use freopen() function from stdio.h with "w" mode as it will first close the file and then reopen it for writing erasing whatever was in the file previously.

Answer 2

with fopen(filename, flag) just open it with flag= "w" or "wb" and it will be cleared

Answer 3

fclose(fopen("file.txt", "w"));

Why this works:

write: Create an empty file for output operations. If a file with the same name already exists, its contents are discarded and the file is treated as a new empty file.

(quote from http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fopen/)

Answer 4

There are two ways:

1. fd=open(filename,O_RDONLY | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC);


2. [cat /dev/null > filename] for BASH. It can be directly used in c program using [system()] system call. 

   system("cat /dev/null > filename");