Sharing I/O Between Fortran and C

Mixing Fortran I/O with C I/O (issuing I/O calls from both C and Fortran routines) is not recommended. It is better to do all Fortran I/O or all C I/O, not both.

The Fortran I/O library is implemented largely on top of the C standard I/O library. Every open unit in a Fortran program has an associated standard I/O file structure. For the stdin, stdout, and stderr streams, the file structure need not be explicitly referenced, so it is possible to share them.

If a Fortran main program calls C to do I/O, the Fortran I/O library must be initialized at program startup to connect units 0, 5, and 6 to stderr, stdin, and stdout, respectively. The C function must take the Fortran I/O environment into consideration to perform I/O on open file descriptors.

However, if a C main program calls a Fortran subprogram to do I/O, the automatic initialization of the Fortran I/O library to connect units 0, 5, and 6 to stderr, stdin, and stdout is lacking. This connection is normally made by a Fortran main program. If a Fortran function attempts to reference the stderr stream (unit 0) without the normal Fortran main program I/O initialization, output will be written to fort.0 instead of to the stderr stream.

The C main program can initialize Fortran I/O and establish the preconnection of units 0, 5, and 6 by calling the f_init() FORTRAN 77 library routine at the start of the program and, optionally, f_exit() at termination.

Remember: even though the main program is in C, you should link with f77.