I have 2 billion integers i would like to write to a binary file (long story). If i do such a thing would i need to write it in as a giant object?
how would this go down?
Im out to find a C book that can help me now, if i cant find one at my library i was hoping you guys could save me.
Thanks!
you'd basically write each integer to file, after opening the file in binary mode.
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/cfileio.html
http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/...&id=1043284392
http://cppreference.com/stdio/fopen.html
http://cppreference.com/stdio/fwrite.html
http://cppreference.com/stdio/fclose.html
Do you want to write the numbers 0..2billion in sequence, or is there something generating numbers (e.g. random numbers, data-values from a measurement, or some such) that you need to write?
It shouldn't be too hard to come up with about 5 lines that do what you want, but it's necessary to understant what you are actually trying to do first.
Also, you need to check that the OS and C-library supports large files (up to about 8GB). Linux in any modern form will be fine, Windows NT/2K/XP/Vista should also be fine.
And of course, you'll need some time for the data to transfer - at least a minute and a half just in transfer-time from the memory to the disk, and the disk may need extra time to move the head around and such, so count on at the very least two minutes.
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Mats
yeah there is something generating the numbers and I have them in a giant array, then i want to write them sequentially to 1 binary file.
I was mostly concerned that writing individual numbers to a binary file wouldn't work out the way i planned.
and im using windows xp so i guess ill be ok.
Why wouldn't it work - binary files can contain anything. Just make sure you specify "wb" as the mode to fopen when you open the file, so that the C-library understands that it shouldn't try to "fix it up" when it sees a newline ['\n'} (which in text-mode should have a '\r' prepended).
You can also write a bunch of data at once, but I wouldn't attempt to write the whole array at once, perhaps a few thousand numbers at a time.
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Mats
If you're not interested in the issues of Endianess or the potential different sizes of an int on different architectures, because this is a test program meant for one platform to learn something, then you should be fine. Go for it.
