File management in C involves creating, opening, reading, writing, and closing files. The C Standard Library provides functions for performing these operations, primarily through the stdio.h library. Understanding file management in C is essential for handling input/output (I/O) operations in real-world applications. Here's a comprehensive guide to file management in C:

1. File Types in C

• Text Files: Store data in a human-readable format (e.g., .txt). Each line of text is separated by newline characters (\\\\n).
• Binary Files: Store data in raw byte format. They are not human-readable and are used for efficient storage of data like images, audio, or executables.

2. Basic File Operations

The standard C library provides functions for performing the following file operations:

• Opening a File: Use the fopen() function to open a file.
• Reading from a File: Use functions like fscanf(), fgets(), fgetc(), or fread().
• Writing to a File: Use functions like fprintf(), fputs(), fputc(), or fwrite().
• Closing a File: Use the fclose() function to close the file after processing.
• Error Handling: Functions like ferror() and perror() help manage errors.

3. File Pointers

Files in C are managed using pointers of type FILE *. This pointer represents a file stream, and all file operations are performed using this pointer.

FILE *fp; // Declare a file pointer

4. Opening a File

You can open a file using the fopen() function, which requires the file name and mode (read, write, etc.).

FILE *fopen(const char *filename, const char *mode);

Common file modes:

• "r": Opens an existing text file for reading.
• "w": Creates a text file for writing (overwrites if the file already exists).