How to flush a TFileStream?

Question

TFileStream provides buffered output, which is great in most cases, but in some cases (especially during debugging) it's nice to flush the buffer immediately. Thing is, I don't know of any way to do that except calling Free, which is kind of counterproductive.

Is there a better way to do it?

Answer 1

You need to flush the stream. Try:

 FlushFileBuffers(fs.Handle);

? Did you see/try this?

Answer 2

I think altCognito's answer (FlushFileBuffers) is probably the best, but only because TFileStream does no buffering by itself. For other, buffered, streams should first look if the stream offers a Flush method. And as a last resort you could probably use the old trick of Seek(Begin) and then Seek(CurrentPos).

Answer 3

It's a bit involved, but you can actually control a lot of that behavior in the call to (win32 api) CreateFile. You can add FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH / FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING or even provide optimization hints to the cache system with FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN or FILE_FLAG_RANDOM_ACCESS. To use TFileStream that way, I think you'd need to override the Create to change how it obtains the file handle. FWIW, FlushFileBuffers is equivalent to a Close/Open on the file. If you're doing a lot of activity with repeated flushes, it will slow the code down considerably.

A bit of documentation here