On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 10:04:19PM -0500, ISHWAR RATTAN wrote: > > Is there a way to place the last line read > when reading from a file? My suspicion is there > is no such thing but i do want to confirm..
Just another guess at what you're asking about; perhaps the word "placed" was intended to be "replaced"; i.e., can you replace a line that you've just read? I think the general answer to that is "no", and the approach I've always taken (using Perl) is to write a new file, copying the old and adding new content, then rename and remove etc. when done. I haven't delved into the internals much, though, and maybe there's a way it could be done, but it hasn't been worth my time to do it. If you think about a file stored on disk, text files have an arbitrary structure defined by the end-of-line character(s). It seems like it should be possible to swap out characters in a line, but the line size would need to stay the same, perhaps using padding with spaces or something. Probably much more reasonably and conventionally doable with fixed-sized records, but if the need was there I don't see why it shouldn't be possible. Ken -- Ken Irving, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]