LIBRARY

#include <xtend/fast-file.h>
-lxtend

SYNOPSIS

ffile_t *ffpopen(const char *cmd, int flags)

ARGUMENTS

cmd     Full command to execute as the child, passed to sh(1)
flags   Open mode flags passed to open(3)

DESCRIPTION

It behaves much like popen(3), except that it returns a fast-file fffile_t pointer rather than a standard I/O FILE pointer, and accepts a full set of open(3) flags rather than the fopen(3) type strings "r", "w", etc.

This allows the calling program to spawn a child process and read its standard output or write to its standard input as easily as reading or writing a file.

The stream should be closed with ffpclose(3) rather than ffclose(3) in order to wait for the child process to complete and return its exit status.

The ffile_t system is simpler than and several times as fast as FILE on typical systems. It is intended for processing large files character-by-character, where low-level block I/O is not convenient, but FILE I/O causes a bottleneck.

RETURN VALUES

EXAMPLES

ffile_t *instream;
if ( (instream = ffpopen("xzcat file.xz", O_RDONLY)) == NULL )
{
    fprintf(stderr, "Failed to read xzcat file.xz.n");
    exit(EX_NOINPUT);
}
ffpclose(instream);

SEE ALSO