When a stream is closed with fclose
, the connection between the
stream and the file is canceled. After you have closed a stream, you
cannot perform any additional operations on it.
int
fclose (FILE *stream)
¶Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap lock | AC-Unsafe lock mem fd | See POSIX Safety Concepts.
This function causes stream to be closed and the connection to
the corresponding file to be broken. Any buffered output is written
and any buffered input is discarded. The fclose
function returns
a value of 0
if the file was closed successfully, and EOF
if an error was detected.
It is important to check for errors when you call fclose
to close
an output stream, because real, everyday errors can be detected at this
time. For example, when fclose
writes the remaining buffered
output, it might get an error because the disk is full. Even if you
know the buffer is empty, errors can still occur when closing a file if
you are using NFS.
The function fclose
is declared in stdio.h.
To close all streams currently available the GNU C Library provides another function.
int
fcloseall (void)
¶Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:streams | AS-Unsafe | AC-Safe | See POSIX Safety Concepts.
This function causes all open streams of the process to be closed and
the connections to corresponding files to be broken. All buffered data
is written and any buffered input is discarded. The fcloseall
function returns a value of 0
if all the files were closed
successfully, and EOF
if an error was detected.
This function should be used only in special situations, e.g., when an error occurred and the program must be aborted. Normally each single stream should be closed separately so that problems with individual streams can be identified. It is also problematic since the standard streams (see Standard Streams) will also be closed.
The function fcloseall
is declared in stdio.h.
If the main
function to your program returns, or if you call the
exit
function (see Normal Termination), all open streams are
automatically closed properly. If your program terminates in any other
manner, such as by calling the abort
function (see Aborting a Program) or from a fatal signal (see Signal Handling), open streams
might not be closed properly. Buffered output might not be flushed and
files may be incomplete. For more information on buffering of streams,
see Stream Buffering.