Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

8.4. 8.4 Random Access Files

The problem with sequential files is that they are, well, sequential. They are great for dumping and retrieving large blocks of data all at once, but they are not suitable for applications that need to read, write, and rewrite the same data in a file multiple times. In those situations random access files provide the only reasonable alternative.

Windows and Linux don't differentiate sequential and random access files anymore than the CPU differentiates byte and character values in memory; it's up to your application to treat the files as sequential or random access. As such, you use many of the same functions to manipulate random access files as you use to manipulate sequential access files; you just use them differently ...