Chapter 3. Advanced File and Directory Processing, and the Registry

File systems provide more than sequential processing; they must also provide random access, file locking, directory processing, and file attribute management. Starting with random file access, which is required by database, file management, and many other applications, this chapter shows how to access files randomly at any location and shows how to use Windows 64-bit file pointers to access files larger than 4GB.

The next step is to show how to scan directory contents and how to manage and interpret file attributes, such as time stamps, access, and size. Finally, file locking protects files from concurrent modification by more than one process (Chapter 6) or thread (Chapter ...

Get Windows System Programming, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.