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Manual Reference Pages  - FCLOSE (3)

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fclose - close a stream

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Errors
Notes

#include <stdio.h>

int fclose(FILE *stream);

The fclose function dissociates the named stream from its underlying file or set of functions. If the stream was being used for output, any buffered data is written first, using fflush(3).

Upon successful completion 0 is returned. Otherwise, EOF is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error. In either case any further access (including another call to fclose()) to the stream results in undefined behaviour.

EBADF	The filedescriptor underlying stream is not valid.

The fclose function may also fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the routines close(2), write(2) or fflush(3).

Note that fclose only flushes the user space buffers provided by the C library. To ensure that the data is physically stored on disk the kernel buffers must be flushed too, e.g. with sync(2) or fsync(2).

The fclose function conforms to ANSI X3.159-1989 (‘‘ANSI C’’).

close(2), fcloseall(3), fflush(3), fopen(3), setbuf(3)

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