> I'm trying to read a string into a buffer, and I have to find the
 > nul terminator to know where to stop. getc() is one way to do
 > this, one character at a time... a way you said was as fast as
 > fread() into a buffer, where I look for the character one at a
 > time in the buffer. You are WRONG. It's much quicker to read a
 > block from the file, and then process the block. I don't know why
 > this should be. How do they read from a file in a block?

 NP> A file read (at the lowest level) places one sector (512 bytes)
 NP> into a particular place in memory allocated for that purpose.

  This is what Paul said, but it doesn't work in practice. If I read
characters using getc() one at a time, it is much slower than using
fread() which reads to a buffer... and then run down the buffer.

 NP> If you know where it is (I've forgotten how to find out) then
 NP> access to the data is easy.

  (grin) Use fread(buffer, 512, 1, filename)...

 NP> IOW it reads a sector from the file regardless of whether your
 NP> program asks for 1 byte or a block.

  No, it doesn't. 

  What you say is probably true, but every time I call getc() it must
read the sector again, move the file pointer up one, and take the
first character.

Regards,
Bob
  
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