There are a few ways to do it. If I want to read and write binary I usually use open(), read(), write(), close(). Which are completely different than doing a byte at a time. You work with integer file descriptors instead of FILE * variables. fileno will get an integer descriptor from a FILE * BTW. You read a buffer full of data, say 32k bytes at once. The buffer is really an array which you can read from really fast because it's in memory. And reading and writing many bytes at once is faster than one at a time. It's called a blockread in Pascal I think, but read() is the C equivalent.
I looked but I don't have any examples handy. OK, these aren't ideal because they also are doing stuff with JPEG images. Here's a read, you probably only care about the part from open() to close(). fbuf is the array to read into, sb.st_size is the file size in bytes from a stat() call.
fd = open(MASKFNAME,O_RDONLY);
if (fd != -1) {
read(fd,fbuf,sb.st_size);
close(fd);
splitmask(fbuf,(uint32_t)sb.st_size); // look at lines, etc
have_mask = 1;
}
Here's a write: (here pix is the byte array, jwidth and jheight are the JPEG width and height so for RGB color we write height * width * 3 color bytes). It's the # of bytes to write.
void simpdump(uint8_t *pix, char *nm) { // makes a raw aka .data file
int sdfd;
sdfd = open(nm,O_WRONLY | O_CREAT);
if (sdfd == -1) {
printf("bad open\n");
exit(-1);
}
printf("width: %i height: %i\n",jwidth,jheight); // to the console
write(sdfd,pix,(jwidth*jheight*3));
close(sdfd);
}
Look at man 2 open, also read, write, close. Also this old-style jpeg example.c: https://github.com/LuaDist/libjpeg/blob/master/example.c I'm reading and writing an entire image at once here. But they're binary reads and writes of bytes, just a lot at once.
"But when I try to read from a file it is not outputting correctly." Hmmm. If you read a number 65 that's (decimal) ASCII for an A. Maybe you should look at man ascii too. If you want a 1 that's ASCII 0x31. A char variable is a tiny 8-bit integer really, if you do a printf as a %i you get the ASCII value, if you do a %c you get the character. Do %x for hexadecimal. All from the same number between 0 and 255.