Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Bits and Pieces

So far we’ve mentioned most of the functions that I use on a day-to-day basis for manipulating files. The topics listed next are not discussed here; details can be found in the manual pages.

File modes

When we open a file with file:open, we open the file in a particular mode or a combination of modes. There are actually many more modes than we might think; for example, it’s possible to read and write gzip-compressed files with the compressed mode flag, and so on. The full list is in the manual pages.

Modification times, groups, symlinks

We can set all of these with routines in file.

Error codes

I’ve rather blandly said that all errors are of the form {error, Why}; in fact, Why is an atom (for example, enoent means a file does not ...