reading from the open socket then writing to a file...

more like appending. check this out. It doesn't work for me. I cant understand why.
When it is run, it asks for your message... but then it doesn't append it. Any ideas?

void postmessage (int sock)
{
int a = 0;
char buffer[255]
write(sock, "Message?\n", 10);
bzero(buffer,255);
n = read(sock,buffer,255);
if (n < 0) error("ERROR reading from socket");
if ((outputfile = fopen("messages.txt", "w")) == NULL)
fprintf(stderr, "Cannot open %s\n", outputfile);
a = 0;
while(ch = buffer[a] != '|', a< 255)
{
n = putc(ch, outputfile);
if (n < 0) error("ERROR writing to file");
a = a + 1;
};
}

>fopen("messages.txt", "w")
"w" is for write mode, you'll need "a", which is for append mode.

Personally, I'd do the loop a bit different. The problem with yours is that it could loop 255 times, but there might not be 255 bytes received from the socket. (what if the user did not supply the | character?).

Code:

---

bytesread = read(sock, buffer, 255);

for (i = 0; i < bytesread; i++)
{
        if (putc(buffer[i], outputfile) == EOF)
        {
                printf ("Write error\n");
                break; /* stop the for loop */
        }
}

---

When I do that, it just skips over the read part and doesn't let me input anything from my telnet client and skips back to the prompt. Any idea why thats caused? I can't figure it out... (this is really my first program... )

Try this:

Code:

---

void postmessage (int sock)
{
        int i, bytesread;
        char buffer[255];
        FILE *outputfile;
        write(sock, "Message?\n", 10);
        bzero(buffer,255);

        bytesread = read(sock, buffer, 255);
       
        printf ("read %d bytes >%s<\n", bytesread, buffer);
        fflush(stdout);
       
        if (bytesread < 0)
        {
                fprintf(stderr, "ERROR reading from socket");
                return;
        }
       
        if ((outputfile = fopen("messages.txt", "w")) == NULL)
        {
                fprintf(stderr, "Cannot open %s\n", outputfile);
                return;
        }

        for (i = 0; i < bytesread; i++)
        {
                if (putc(buffer[i], outputfile) == EOF)
                {
                        printf ("Write error\n");
                        break; /* stop the for loop */
                }
        }
       
        fclose(outputfile);
}

---

Make the mode "w" or "a" as you want.

This code leaves a few holes, like getting more data from the same socket.

>>write(sock, "Message?\n", 10);

you are asking it to send 10 bytes but only give it 9 as the terminator is not sent (not to mention if is UNICODE in which case is 18 bytes long). Use strlen() (or lstrlen() for 32 bit WIN OS compatibility).

Strings within " " are null terminated by the compiler in C (AFAIK).

WSAGetLastError() may help in debugging if a call to a socket fails.

>you are asking it to send 10 bytes but only give it 9 as the terminator is not sent
10th byte is the '\0', even this will be written(sent) on the descriptor 'sock' since the number of bytes to be sent is 10 as passed to: write(sock, "Message?\n", 10);

Thx, I can probly get it to work marginally well now. Thx again.