c - What are the properties of the Objects of type FILE

Question

FILE objects are usually created by a call to either fopen or tmpfile, which both return a reference to one of these objects.

What are the attributes of the Struct named FILE, or is it platform dependent?

Answer 1

The answer is it is platform dependent. At least using glibc on Linux, FILE is in fact a typedef from _IO_FILE which is implemented in libio.h:

struct _IO_FILE {
  int _flags;       /* High-order word is _IO_MAGIC; rest is flags. */
#define _IO_file_flags _flags

  /* The following pointers correspond to the C++ streambuf protocol. */
  /* Note:  Tk uses the _IO_read_ptr and _IO_read_end fields directly. */
  char* _IO_read_ptr;   /* Current read pointer */
  char* _IO_read_end;   /* End of get area. */
  char* _IO_read_base;  /* Start of putback+get area. */
  char* _IO_write_base; /* Start of put area. */
  char* _IO_write_ptr;  /* Current put pointer. */
  char* _IO_write_end;  /* End of put area. */
  char* _IO_buf_base;   /* Start of reserve area. */
  char* _IO_buf_end;    /* End of reserve area. */
  /* The following fields are used to support backing up and undo. */
  char *_IO_save_base; /* Pointer to start of non-current get area. */
  char *_IO_backup_base;  /* Pointer to first valid character of backup area */
  char *_IO_save_end; /* Pointer to end of non-current get area. */

  struct _IO_marker *_markers;

  struct _IO_FILE *_chain;

  int _fileno;
#if 0
  int _blksize;
#else
  int _flags2;
#endif
  _IO_off_t _old_offset; /* This used to be _offset but it's too small.  */

#define __HAVE_COLUMN /* temporary */
  /* 1+column number of pbase(); 0 is unknown. */
  unsigned short _cur_column;
  signed char _vtable_offset;
  char _shortbuf[1];

  /*  char* _save_gptr;  char* _save_egptr; */

  _IO_lock_t *_lock;
#ifdef _IO_USE_OLD_IO_FILE
};

As Martin York says in his comments, you are not meant to know about the internals of this structure. This particular definition of the structure is not guaranteed to be the same across implementations; I'd expect MSVC's file structure to be different.