1. Oracle Solaris 11.4 Programming Interfaces Guide
  2. Input/Output Interfaces
  3. Files and I/O Interfaces

Files and I/O Interfaces

Files that are organized as a sequence of data are called regular files. Regular files can contain ASCII text, text in some other binary data encoding, executable code, or any combination of text, data, and code.

A regular file is made up of the following components:

  • Control data, which is called the inode. This data includes the file type, the access permissions, the owner, the file size, and the location of the data blocks.

  • File contents is a non-terminated sequence of bytes.

The Oracle Solaris OS provides the following basic forms of file I/O interfaces:

  • The basic file I/O interfaces are described in Basic File I/O.

  • The standard I/O buffering provides an easier interface and improved efficiency to run an application on a system without virtual memory. In an application running in a virtual memory environment, such as Oracle Solaris, standard file I/O is outdated.

  • The memory mapping interface is described in Memory Management Interfaces. Mapping files is the efficient form of the file I/O for applications running in the Oracle Solaris platform.