File I/O with FreeBASIC

 

In FreeBASIC, there are 4 possible ways to perform file I/O:

1. Using the built-in BASIC commands like Open , Get, Put, and Close. This way is mostly portable across all platforms supported by FreeBASIC. Open files are identified by "file numbers", that are specific to FreeBASIC and can't be passed into functions from below.

2. Using the C stream I/O functions like fopen, fread, ftell, fclose (see Stream I/O in C Standard Library Functions) of the C library FreeBASIC relies on. This is slightly faster than and adds a few features beyond method above, and still well portable. Open files are identified by file pointers, as in the C language, again unique to this access method. The FileAttr function can be used to return a stream I/O pointer from a file number as in 1. above.

3. Using the C low-level I/O functions like _open, _read, _write, _close (see Low Level I/O in C Standard Library Functions). Those functions should be portable, but so far headers are available for Win32 only, so code using them will not compile to any other platform by now.

4. Talk directly to the OS kernel (DOS: use DOS and DPMI INT's , Win32: use API calls like CreateFile, WriteFile). This is no longer portable. Files are identified by handles generated by and specific to the OS kernel.

This example shows and compares methods 1. and 2. described above, and reports the values returned by the functions used. It expects 2 commandline arguments, providing names of 2 different files with same size allows to compare the reading performance (make sure the file cache is empty before starting test) :