Delete a Line from a file in C Language

Question

I want to delete certain lines in a file and insert certain lines in the same file based on whether certain parts of the line match a specified string. Is there a way of doi

Answer 1

You can't easily "cut" a section of a file out in-place. You always make a temporary copy somewhere. This isn't a C thing; it's true for any language.

You could mmap the file, and then when you find the line you want to erase, you can memcpy everything after it to the location of the start of the line. I'd question how efficient that would be; the temporary file might be quicker.

Answer 2

If the file is not big enough for processing on the RAM, then you can use Linked list of strings, where each node represent a Line, that is node of the linked list is created based on the '\n' character and then you can do insert operations and delete operations on the linked list as necessary and then you can overwrite on the same file using the linked list.

For Example, mytext.txt

This is a test file

A line has to be added above

This line has to be deleted

Now when you create a linked list of above file, it would be like

[This is a test file] -> [A line has to be added above] -> [This line has to be deleted] -> [NULL]

Insert Operation will change the linked list to

[This is a test file] -> [This is a new line] -> [A line has to be added above] -> [This line has to be deleted] -> [NULL]

Delete Operation will change the linked list to

[This is a test file] -> [This is a new line] -> [A line has to be added above] -> [NULL]

Now you can write the linked list to the mytext.txt file with '\n' Character in the end of every node.

The Final File would be, mytext.txt

This is a test file

This is a new line

A line has to be added above

Answer 3

Problem is, a file is (essentially) an array of bytes on disk (or whatever other physical substrate, but, bytes anyway!), and "a line" can take a varying number of bytes; so to insert or remove lines (unless you're always rigorously replacing a line with another line of exactly the same length in bytes) would require "shifting" all the rest of the file "up" or "down" by the difference in bytes... which can be an extremely onerous operation (as the rest of the file can be gigabytes even if you're just changing one line's length by 1 byte towards the beginning of the file).

So, such operations can be incredibly onerous and therefore are typically never offered as primitives in ANY language supporting files with variable line length (C, Python, Java, C++, Ruby, or ANY other such language). It's extremely unlikely that you really need to pay such a potentially unbound cost in performance AND risk (a system or disk crash during the "shift" of GB or data up or down can destroy the usabilty of your whole, huge file), when the perfectly simple, adequate, fast, safe, and reasonable technique you're trying to avoid has basically ZERO downsides (so it's far from obvious WHY are you trying to avoid it?).

Use a result-file different from the source-file, when done mv the result-file over the source-file (an atomic operation on most systems if you're within the same filesystem), and you really do have the best of all possible worlds.