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When you want to do input or output to a file, you have a choice of two
basic mechanisms for representing the connection between your program
and the file: file descriptors and streams. File descriptors are
represented as objects of type int, while streams are represented
as FILE * objects.
File descriptors provide a primitive, low-level interface to input and output operations. Both file descriptors and streams can represent a connection to a device (such as a terminal), or a pipe or socket for communicating with another process, as well as a normal file. But, if you want to do control operations that are specific to a particular kind of device, you must use a file descriptor; there are no facilities to use streams in this way. You must also use file descriptors if your program needs to do input or output in special modes, such as nonblocking (or polled) input (see File Status Flags).
Streams provide a higher-level interface, layered on top of the primitive file descriptor facilities. The stream interface treats all kinds of files pretty much alike—the sole exception being the three styles of buffering that you can choose (see Stream Buffering).
The main advantage of using the stream interface is that the set of
functions for performing actual input and output operations (as opposed
to control operations) on streams is much richer and more powerful than
the corresponding facilities for file descriptors. The file descriptor
interface provides only simple functions for transferring blocks of
characters, but the stream interface also provides powerful formatted
input and output functions (printf and scanf) as well as
functions for character- and line-oriented input and output.
Since streams are implemented in terms of file descriptors, you can extract the file descriptor from a stream and perform low-level operations directly on the file descriptor. You can also initially open a connection as a file descriptor and then make a stream associated with that file descriptor.
In general, you should stick with using streams rather than file descriptors, unless there is some specific operation you want to do that can only be done on a file descriptor. If you are a beginning programmer and aren’t sure what functions to use, we suggest that you concentrate on the formatted input functions (see Formatted Input) and formatted output functions (see Formatted Output).
If you are concerned about portability of your programs to systems other than GNU, you should also be aware that file descriptors are not as portable as streams. You can expect any system running ISO C to support streams, but non-GNU systems may not support file descriptors at all, or may only implement a subset of the GNU functions that operate on file descriptors. Most of the file descriptor functions in the GNU C Library are included in the POSIX.1 standard, however.
Next: File Position, Up: Input/Output Concepts [Contents][Index]