lseek. Positioning cursor at end of file problem

I'm trying to set the current position to a location well beyond the end of the file.

However, when I input a string such as "testing 1 2 3.." at the end of the file with offset eg 1000 bytes, I can no longer open the file. It says

Code:

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gedit has not been able to detect the character coding.
Please check that you are not trying to open a binary file.
Select a character coding from the menu and try again.

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Also, is there a command I can put inside my code that actually reads the file and displays it on the screen?
Seems like nread just returns a ssize_t value.

Code

Code:

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#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main()

{
        int fd;       
        ssize_t nread,nwrite,nbytes;
        off_t newpos;
        char buffer[1024];

        /*open file for reading*/

        fd = open("lseek.txt",O_RDWR);

        if (fd == -1)
        {
                printf("Error! Could not open file\n");
                exit(1);
        }

        newpos = lseek(fd,20000, SEEK_END);

        nread = read(fd, buffer, 20);       

        printf("End of file: %s\n", buffer);

       
        strcpy(buffer,"testing 1 2 3...");
        nbytes = strlen(buffer);       
        nwrite = write(fd,buffer,nbytes);

        printf("End of file: %s\n", buffer);
       
       
        close(fd);

}

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Well if you seek past the end of a file and then write something, then the gap you left will be read as \0

This is not an ASCII character, so gedit will barf.

I suggest using a hex editor if you want to see what the file looks like.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Salem

Well if you seek past the end of a file and then write something, then the gap you left will be read as \0

This is not an ASCII character, so gedit will barf.

I suggest using a hex editor if you want to see what the file looks like.

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thanks for your reply.

Say I add a string ("hello" to the end of the file (eg. with offset 20000 bytes after EOF as above).

If I type

Code:

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cat filename.txt

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, it displays two lines of text

Code:

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random text in here
hello

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but if i type

Code:

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more filename.txt

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it displays the first line of text and has the option of "more". When I keep pressing enter to the end of the file, the final string (hello) doesn't exist.

Anyone know why this is the case?
random text in here

As Salem has told you by seeking past the end of the file and then writing some more text you are creating a file that contains non printable NUL characters.
It seems that cat just ignores this NULs and more just gets confused.
After all you are using programs that are supposed to display text-files with a file that isn't a proper text-file. So anything can happen.
The question is: Why do you want to create such a file in the first place ?
Kurt

You still need to open your file in a hex editor. If you don't have one (and are too lazy to google/install one), a function that does this is actually really easy to write. You can format the output however you want, but the gist of the function should resemble:

Code:

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#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>

/* ... */

void hex_dump (const char *path)
{
    int i, fd;
    char buf[9];

    fd = open(path, O_RDONLY);
   
    while (read(fd, buf, 8) > 0) {
        for (i = 0; i < 8; i++)
            printf("%.02x ", buf[i]);
        printf("\n");
    }

    close(fd);
}

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Or something, I didn't test it. Either way, you could try c/ping the function into your code and inputting your file, and see what it prints out. If it spits a bunch of "00 00 00" before valid characters, you need to fix your other code.