function
<cstdio>

fseek

int fseek ( FILE * stream, long int offset, int origin );
Reposition stream position indicator
Sets the position indicator associated with the stream to a new position.

For streams open in binary mode, the new position is defined by adding offset to a reference position specified by origin.

For streams open in text mode, offset shall either be zero or a value returned by a previous call to ftell, and origin shall necessarily be SEEK_SET.

If the function is called with other values for these arguments, support depends on the particular system and library implementation (non-portable).

The end-of-file internal indicator of the stream is cleared after a successful call to this function, and all effects from previous calls to ungetc on this stream are dropped.

On streams open for update (read+write), a call to fseek allows to switch between reading and writing.

Parameters

stream
Pointer to a FILE object that identifies the stream.
offset
Binary files: Number of bytes to offset from origin.
Text files: Either zero, or a value returned by ftell.
origin
Position used as reference for the offset. It is specified by one of the following constants defined in <cstdio> exclusively to be used as arguments for this function:
ConstantReference position
SEEK_SETBeginning of file
SEEK_CURCurrent position of the file pointer
SEEK_ENDEnd of file *
* Library implementations are allowed to not meaningfully support SEEK_END (therefore, code using it has no real standard portability).

Return Value

If successful, the function returns zero.
Otherwise, it returns non-zero value.
If a read or write error occurs, the error indicator (ferror) is set.

Example

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
/* fseek example */
#include <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
  FILE * pFile;
  pFile = fopen ( "example.txt" , "wb" );
  fputs ( "This is an apple." , pFile );
  fseek ( pFile , 9 , SEEK_SET );
  fputs ( " sam" , pFile );
  fclose ( pFile );
  return 0;
}

After this code is successfully executed, the file example.txt contains:
This is a sample.


See also