Bytes vs. Positions

• I could probably talk all day about the various problems that come up

• So instead, we'll have one slide

• This always works, no matter what:

        my $position = tell FH;

        # read and write FH here ...

        seek FH, $position, SEEK_SET;

• This always works, no matter what:

        seek FH, 0, SEEK_SET;

• Bytes and characters are the same on Unix systems when files have 8-bit encodings

  • (Like ordinary text files, or files with ISO-8859 characters)

• Ditto for DOS/Windows systems if the filehandle is in binary mode:

        binmode(FH);

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Copyright © 2003 M. J. Dominus