Many of the functions described in this chapter return the value of the
macro EOF
to indicate unsuccessful completion of the operation.
Since EOF
is used to report both end of file and random errors,
it's often better to use the feof
function to check explicitly
for end of file and ferror
to check for errors. These functions
check indicators that are part of the internal state of the stream
object, indicators set if the appropriate condition was detected by a
previous I/O operation on that stream.
These symbols are declared in the header file `stdio.h'.
EOF
is -1
. In other libraries, its
value may be some other negative number.
The file positioning functions (see section File Positioning) also clear the end-of-file indicator for the stream.
feof
function returns nonzero if and only if the end-of-file
indicator for the stream stream is set.
ferror
function returns nonzero if and only if the error
indicator for the stream stream is set, indicating that an error
has occurred on a previous operation on the stream.
In addition to setting the error indicator associated with the stream,
the functions that operate on streams also set errno
in the same
way as the corresponding low-level functions that operate on file
descriptors. For example, all of the functions that perform output to a
stream--such as fputc
, printf
, and fflush
---are
implemented in terms of write
, and all of the errno
error
conditions defined for write
are meaningful for these functions.
For more information about the descriptor-level I/O functions, see
section Low-Level Input/Output.
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