C fopen vs open

Question

Is there any reason (other than syntactic ones) that you'd want to use

FILE *fdopen(int fd, const char *mode);

or

FILE *fopen(const char *path, const char *mode);

instead of

int open(const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);

when using C in a Linux environment?

Answer 1

If you have a FILE *, you can use functions like fscanf, fprintf and fgets etc. If you have just the file descriptor, you have limited (but likely faster) input and output routines read, write etc.

Answer 2

open() is a low-level os call. fdopen() converts an os-level file descriptor to the higher-level FILE-abstraction of the C language. fopen() calls open() in the background and gives you a FILE-pointer directly.

There are several advantages to using FILE-objects rather raw file descriptors, which includes greater ease of usage but also other technical advantages such as built-in buffering. Especially the buffering generally results in a sizeable performance advantage.

Answer 3

Unless you're part of the 0.1% of applications where using open is an actual performance benefit, there really is no good reason not to use fopen. As far as fdopen is concerned, if you aren't playing with file descriptors, you don't need that call.

Stick with fopen and its family of methods (frwite, fread, fprintf, et al) and you'll be very satisfied. Just as importantly, other programmers will be satisfied with your code.

Answer 4

There are four main reasons to use fopen instead of open.

1. fopen provides you with buffering IO that may turn out to be a lot faster than what you're doing with open.
2. fopen does line ending translation if the file is not opened in binary mode, which can be very helpful if your program is ever ported to a non-Unix environment.
3. A FILE * gives you the ability to use fscanf and other stdio functions.
4. Your code may someday need to be ported to some other platform that only supports ANSI C and does not support the open function.

In my opinion the line ending translation more often gets in your way than helps you, and the parsing of fscanf is so weak that you inevitably end up tossing it out in favor of something more useful.

And most platforms that support C have an open function.

That leaves the buffering question. In places where you are mainly reading or writing a file sequentially, the buffering support is really helpful and a big speed improvement. But it can lead to some interesting problems in which data does not end up in the file when you expect it to be there. You have to remember to fclose or fflush at the appropriate times.

If you're doing seeks, the usefulness of buffering quickly goes down.

Of course, my bias is that I tend to work with sockets a whole lot, and there the fact that you really want to be doing non-blocking IO (which FILE * totally fails to support in any reasonable way) with no buffering at all and often have complex parsing requirements really color my perceptions.

Answer 5

Using open, read, write means you have to worry about signal interaptions.

If the call was interrupted by a signal handler the functions will return -1 and set errno to EINTR.

So the proper way to close a file would be

while (retval = close(fd), retval == -1 && ernno == EINTR) ;