Professional Assembly Language

Chapter 16. Using Files

There are many occasions when an application must store data for later use, or read configuration information from a configuration file. To handle these functions, the assembly language program must be able to interact with files on the UNIX system.

This chapter describes how to handle files within assembly language programs, both writing data out to them and reading data in from them. Two basic methods are used to access files from assembly language programs. One method is to use the standard C functions. If you already program in C or C++, you should be familiar with these—fopen(), read(), and write(). The C file I/O functions in turn use the Linux system calls (described in Chapter 12, "Using Linux System Calls") to access files. In assembly language programming, you can bypass the C function calls and directly access the Linux file I/O system calls provided by the kernel. This is the method described in this chapter.

The chapter starts out with a brief explanation of how the UNIX system handles files. Next it shows how to write data to files, specifying the proper permissions and access types. After that, how to read data from files is shown, along with how to process the data and write to another file. Finally, the topic of using memory-mapped files is presented. This feature enables you to read a complete file into memory, process and modify the data within the memory-mapped file, and write the data back to the original file.

The File-Handling Sequence ...