Reading input data files?

[anewcreation84]

Hi Everyone,

I'm good at writing algorithms... I took C++ for engineers, but now I'm in the business world and I am struggling reading in data files. I am dealing with some files that exceed 2 gig, and they are data bases, that are fixed length files. The same data fields are always in the same positions, and each record is a line in the file and each line ends with a character return line feed. what commands would you use to read in a large file like that and have access to each line in the data file?

[webJose]

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/

[kbw]

streams may not be your best choice here as the streampos' wrap at 2^31 on a 32 bit system. You may need to use native OS calls.

[anewcreation84]

I use to create a bat file and use the cat command to combine data file in windows, but we have now upgraded to Windows XP and that command is no longer valid. I don't really know what vative OS calls are, but I am assuming it was something like cating the files together. Is there a good website you know of for learning how to use native OS calls?

[kbw]

Native calls:
CreateFile/OpenFile
ReadFile/WriteFile
CloseHandle

The cat command was never a native Windows utility, you probably got it from UnxUtils.

The Windows command equivalent is type, but that's built into cmd.exe.

Also, copy can contatenate files.

Is there a good website you know of for learning how to use native OS calls?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490890.aspx

[anewcreation84]

thank copy works great, and you were correct about the unxutils as well. I forgot we did have our old system connected to a unix server as well.